Friday, May 27, 2011

The New False Faith

Adherents of the supposedly civilized world's new religion took great satisfaction and delight in scoffing at the Elmer Gantry type clergyman who has had to revise his doomsday prophecy as well as at  the ignorant souls who believed his now disproved end-of-the-world prediction. 


Nonetheless, the scoffers include large numbers of faithful adherents of the equally dubious prophesies of the modern world's new religion: the supposedly looming global warming catastrophe, which also has had to undergo revision as a result of its encounter with reality. No longer referred to as "global warming," it has morphed into and currently is referred to as  "climate change." This new faith's followers steadfastly refuse to look behind the curtain where they would observe that their leaders just a few decades ago were predicting that mankind would be beset by mass starvations and global cooling and new ice ages by the end of the 20th Century.


The new faith's priesthood is safe in claiming that the climate is changing. It's like predicting tides rising and falling.  The earth's climates always have been, are, and almost certainly always will be changing. Change is constant in the universe and on our earth.


One of the great failings of human beings is the almost universally shared assumption that what we have experienced in the course of our lives is "normal." Thus, we tend to believe that our civilization is normal even though what we deem to be civilization is relatively new. Barbarism and chaos would be considered normal if that term denoted the conditions under which human beings existed for most of our species' existence on this planet.


Change is what is normal and it is the ultimate conceit of homo sapiens to believe that we can know what conditions or changes are the most beneficial in the natural world or that we can control those conditions or changes. All one needs to do to understand the hubris underlying such beliefs is to examine the climate shifts that have taken place throughout our globe's existence or even to look at our recently experienced earthquakes, volcanos, tsunamis, tornados, floods . . . you name it.


Want something to believe in without phony profit-seeking prophets? Try this one:


NATURE BATS LAST 

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