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Eco-Sacrifice is Closer Than You Think

by Christopher Chantrill
April 02, 2006 at 3:38 pm

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WE WESTERNERS have been properly horrified in recent weeks as the Afghani courts have prosecuted the Christian convert Abdul Rahman and imams of the religion of peace have called for the apostate’s death.

“Philistine hypocrisy,” writes Spengler in Asia Times. It makes complete sense to kill the apostate, “for faith is life and its abandonment is death.” The last Christian heretic was executed in Spain as recently as 1826. In the United States we were killing Mormons as late as 1844. Then the real killing began as the modern secular religions spread across the world.

Between the 1920s and 1950s the devotees of the most successful religion in history, the Communists, were killing all the heretic kulaks and capitalist roaders they could find. The pagan Nazis had a go at killing all the Jews.

But now a new secular religion is gaining adherents in the Western world. It too believes that its faith is the key to saving life, not just human life but all life on the planet. It declares that we are all doomed by the coming apocalypse of global warming unless we repent.

Conservative politicians are beginning to take this religion seriously. President Bush has spoken about our addiction to oil and British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has installed a wind turbine on his London home.

The conservative media is also taking the religion of global warming seriously. The London Times and Daily Telegraph both ran opinion pieces April 1 on the religious nature of the global warming movement. As of old, its prophets warn us of the dangers of our luxurious times. They tell us, writes Matthew Parris, that

“Our age is not living as it should. The pursuit of riches has distracted us. Lives have been corrupted by lust, vanity, wastefulness and greed. We have become lazy and selfish. Our spirits are sick. And — count upon it — we shall be punished. One way or another we shall have to pay.”

These new Jeremiahs, prophesying that we are all doomed unless we repent, are the prophets of climate change, and they are calling us to sacrifice. They do not want us to sacrifice our first-born sons, not yet, but they do want us to sacrifice our big cars, our big houses, our meat, our fat, and our needless jet travel to faraway places.

Then there is Dr. Eric R. Pianka, a “University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert” who advocates “the elimination of 90 percent of Earth’s population by airborne Ebola.” At a speech delivered to the Texas Academy of Science and reported by Forrest M. Mims III “Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures.”

All religions have this theme of sacrifice and repentance, but one religion has finessed it in a brilliant way that few commentators have grasped. The concept starts in Genesis. Instead of making Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac God lets him sacrifice a ram instead, which you will agree is a much more sensible thing to do. The Jews developed this form of sacrifice into a fine art. The Temple in Jerusalem had a special drainage system to drain away all the blood when the rich brought hundreds of animals at a time to the slaughter.

But then came a radical change. About 2000 years ago in a confusing episode over which people still furiously contest, God said: Enough of all this wasteful sacrifice. Because I so love the world, I will sacrifice my own Son for your sins so you don’t have to sacrifice your sons or your livestock.

This Christian doctrine can have a practical effect. In China, when non-Christian villagers experience sickness or misfortune they often sacrifice their livestock to appease the evil spirits. But Christian villagers don’t sacrifice, for Jesus already died for their sins. They end up being more prosperous.

Of course, the eco-apocalyptics are not fooled by this. They are much too sophisticated to fall for the transparent and self-serving notion that God would sacrifice his Son for our sins. They demand the satisfaction of real sacrifice and real blood gushing into the gutters as in the old Temple in Jerusalem.

Some people have complained that the eco-believers are hypocrites and instead of sacrificing are buying expensive Prius hybrid cars, eating high-priced organic food, and are building huge eco-friendly mansions. But they are missing the point.

If the infidels of the world do not acknowledge the one true faith and worship the gods of global warming with sacrifice and true repentance in strict observance of the Kyoto rituals, shall we not have to kill them in order to “save the planet?”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District


Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm


Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values


Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization


Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue


Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph


Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self


Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion


Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America


Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital


German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West


Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action


presented by Christopher Chantrill

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