The False Climate Religion

 

Through science, technology, and industry we have achieved a very high standard of living, measured in terms of material prosperity, in Western Civilization since the beginning of the Modern Age and especially the last two centuries.    Prosperity in itself is not a bad thing.   We have a tendency, however, in our fallen sinfulness to respond to prosperity inappropriately.   The inappropriate way to respond to prosperity is to look at it with self-satisfaction, thinking that it is due entirely and only to our own effort and ingenuity, and to forget God, from Whom all blessings flow, as the doxology says.  There is a lot of sin in this attitude, especially the sin of ingratitude.   This sin is an invitation to God to take away His blessings and curse us instead.     It is a sin of which we have been most guilty as a civilization.   That we have been so guilty and have forgotten our God is evident in how we now refer to ourselves as Western Civilization rather than Christendom – Christian Civilization.

 

The appropriate thing for us to do would be to repent.   These familiar words were spoken by the Lord to King Solomon on the occasion of the completion and consecration of the Temple but the message contained within them is one that we would do well to apply to ourselves today:

 

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. (2 Chron. 7:14)

 

Now, imagine a man who in his prosperity becomes self-satisfied and forgets God.   His conscience keeps nagging at him but unwilling to humble himself, pray, seek God, and repent, he misinterprets his guilty feelings and concludes that his prosperity is the problem and not his ingratitude and his having forgotten God.   In an attempt to assuage this misdirected guilt, he decides to sacrifice his prosperity to an idol.   He does so, however, in such a way, that it is his children more than himself who end up suffering.

 

What ought we to think of such a man?   Does he deserve commendation for trying to make things right, albeit in an ill-informed and ineffective way?   Or does he deserve rebuke for piling further errors and sins upon his initial sin of forgetting God?

 

“Thou art the man” as the prophet Nathan said to King David in 2 Samuel 12:7 after telling a story that prompted the king to unknowingly condemn himself in the affair of Bathsheba.   Or rather, we all “art the man”.   For this is precisely what we as a civilization have done or are in the process of doing.

 

For centuries, ever since the start of the Modern Age, Western Civilization has been turning its back on its heritage from Christendom.   Indeed, the conversion of the Christian civilization of Christendom into the secular civilization of the West could be said to have been the ultimate goal of liberalism, the spirit that drove the Modern Age, all along.   The liberal project and the Modern Age were more or less complete with the end of the Second World War and since that time Westerners have been abandoning the Church and her God in droves.    In the same post-World War II era we have reaped the harvest in material prosperity sown through centuries of scientific discoveries.   These were made possible because at the dawn of Modern science people still believed in the God Who created the world and that therefore there is order in the world He created to be discovered.   This is the basis of all true scientific discovery.

 

Collectively, we feel guilty for abandoning God, but we have not been willing, at least not yet, to return to Him on a civilizational scale.   Sensing that we have incurred divine displeasure, but not willing to admit to ourselves that our apostasy from Christianity and forgetting the True and Living God is the problem, we have instead blamed our material prosperity and the means by which we attained it.   By means, I don’t mean science, which we have been so far unwilling to blame because we have transferred our faith in God onto it and turned it into an idol, but rather our industry, aided and enhanced by science.    

 

Just as we have transferred our guilt for having forgotten God in our material prosperity onto the industry that we put into attaining that prosperity, which so laden with transferred guilt we usually call capitalism after the name godless left-wing philosophers and economists gave to human industry when they bogeyfied it in their efforts to promote their Satanic alternative, socialism, the institutionalization of the Deadly Sin of Envy, so we have transferred the sense of impending judgement from God for abandoning Him, onto industry.   We have done this by inventing the crackpot idea that such things as burning fuels to heat our homes in winter, cook our food and get about from place to place, and even raising livestock to feed ourselves, are releasing too much carbon dioxide, methane, etc. into the atmosphere and that this is leading to an impending man-made climate apocalypse in which temperatures rise (or plummet depending on which false prophet of doom is talking), polar ice caps melt, the coasts are inundated from rising sea levels, and extreme weather events increase in frequency and intensity. 

 

To prevent this climactic apocalypse, we have convinced ourselves, we must appease the pagan nature deities we have offended with sacrifice.   We must sacrifice our efficient gasoline-powered vehicles and agree to drive ridiculously expensive electric vehicles, even when travelling long distance in Canada in the dead of winter.   We must sacrifice heating our homes in winter and grow accustomed to wearing enough layers to make Eskimoes look like Hawaiian hula girls in comparison indoors all winter long.   We must sacrifice the hope of affordable living and watch the cost of everything go up and up and up.   We must sacrifice the future of the generations who will come after us

 

Those of us who express skepticism towards all this are mocked as “science deniers” even though this new false religion is not scientific in the slightest.   Carbon dioxide, which is to plant life what oxygen is to ours, treated as a pollutant?   The seas rising from all that floating ice melting?   You would have to have failed elementary school science to accept this nonsense.   It is certainly incredible to anyone with a basic knowledge of history and who grasps the concept of cause and effect.   The Little Ice Age ended in the middle of the nineteenth century.   When an Ice Age ends a warming period begins.   This is one of the causes of the boom in human industry at the end of the Modern Age, not its effect.   It is a good thing too, for humans, animals, plants and basically all life on earth, because live thrives more in warmer periods than colder ones.  Anyone who isn’t a total airhead knows this.

 

Speaking of total airheads, Captain Airhead, whose premiership here in the Dominion of Canada was already too old in the afternoon of his first day in office, has been using that office as a pulpit to preach this false climate religion for the duration of the time he has been in it.   Recently, in response to his popularity having plunged lower than the Judecca, he granted a three year exemption on his carbon tax for those who heat their homes with oil, which, as it turns out, benefits Liberal voters in Atlantic Canada and hardly anyone else.   Faced with demands from across Canada that he grant further exemptions, he has so far resisted, and with the help of the Lower Canadian separatists, defeated the Conservative motion in the House, backed by the socialists, for a general home heating exemption.   Hopefully this will speed his departure and the day we can find a better Prime Minister to lead His Majesty’s government in Ottawa.  The point, of course, is that by granting even that partial exemption, for nakedly political purposes, Captain Airhead by his actions admitted what he still denies with his words, that the world is not facing imminent destruction because of too much carbon dioxide.

 

Captain Airhead’s climate religion and its doomsday scenario have been proven false let us turn to the words of St. Peter and hearing what the true religion has to say about the coming judgement:

 

But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.  Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?  Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.   Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless.  (2 Peter 3:7-14)

 

It may be today, it may be a thousand years from now, we don’t know, but when God has appointed it to happen, it will happen, and there is nothing we can do that will prevent it.   Instead of trying to do the impossible, prevent it, we should rather prepare ourselves for it, by doing what the Apostle recommends in the above passage, the avoidance of which is as we have seen, the source of this false climate religion.   For if we turn back in repentance to the God we have forgotten, we can look forward to His coming again in fiery judgement with faith and hope and peace and sing, in the words of gospel songwriter Jim Hill:

 

What a day that will be
When my Jesus I shall see
And I look upon his face
The one who saved me by his grace
When he takes me by the hand
And leads me through the Promised Land
What a day, glorious day that will be!