Saturday, December 4, 2010

Abandoning Reason and Praying to Mythical Goddesses, the Global Warming Cult Marches on Merrily

The Global Warming summit meeting in Cancun is producing the usual loony statements of the left-wing political class, which has abandoned belief in the true and living God known by reason and faith, and so is now willing to believe in ridiculous fairy tales and tall tales.

One paper called for WW II style rationing for the West and unlimited economic growth and consumption for the Third World. The Daily Telegraph reports:

In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years. [If Global Warming is so bad, why not reduce emissions everywhere?]

This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars.

Prof Anderson admitted it “would not be easy” to persuade people to reduce their consumption of goods. [Which is why, naturally, such change will have to be imposed by a top-down, authoritarian police state - for our own good, of course. No, he didn't say that, but that is what he is getting at. See the next sentence.]

He said politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the last “time of crisis” in the 1930s and 40s.

This, of course, would not do anything actually to reduce emissions. It would just transfer wealth from the West to the Third World in a kind of global redistribution of wealth just as the Communist playbook calls for.

But, if the carbon emissions are bringing disaster on us all, why does it make any difference if the Third World does the emitting rather than the West? If we stand still and they come up to our levels, the total emissions don't go down: right? And the current level is already bringing the floods, migrations and destruction isn't it? So, isn't the result the same either way? Or is it that the Global Warming activists don't actually believe in anthropogenic global warming any more than you or I do? Isn't it just a convenient excuse to do what they actually want to do anyway on other grounds?

I guess that when you have been trying to make yourself believe in a myth for a long enough time, you eventually lose whatever tenuous grip you might have had on reality. From the Washington Post's "you could never make up stuff like this" file comes this report:

With United Nations climate negotiators facing an uphill battle to advance their goal of reducing emissions linked to global warming, it's no surprise that the woman steering the talks appealed to a Mayan goddess Monday. [Notice how WaPo tries to make it sound normal for scientists to be praying to the jaguar goddess by saying: "it is no surprise. . ." Actually it almost always surprises me when someone who supposedly stands for scientific reason prays to a mythical goddess. But that's just me.]

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also "the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you -- because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools." [I wonder who decided she was the goddess of reason; is that an Enlightenment spin on the old paganism? Or were the old pagans really "scientific" societies in the sense that Marxists mean "scientific"?]

She called for "a balanced outcome" which would marry financial and emissions commitments from industrialized countries aimed at combating climate change with "the understanding of fairness that will guide long-term mitigation efforts." [When the looters start talking about "balanced outcomes" and "fairness," you might want to check your wallet to make sure it's still there.]

"Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skilful [sic] interlacing of many threads," said Figueres, who hails from Costa Rica and started her greetings in Spanish before switching to English. "I am convinced that 20 years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together and think back fondly to Cancun and the inspiration of Ixchel."

I suppose that it is only fitting that the supposedly scientific Global Warming Cult listens to mythical jaguar goddesses to get their marching orders. After all, those old pagan cults were top-down, authoritarian, religious states in which no individual dissent or freedom were tolerated. Sounds like the Marxist Dream to me.

I'll give the last few words to Augustine, who was skeptical of pagan empires and their pretenses to "justice." He was talking about Rome, but one could be forgiven for thinking that he was talking about the UN.
Thus, where there is not true justice there can be no assemblage of men associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and therefore there can be no people, as defined by Scipio or Cicero; and if no people, then no weal of the people, but only of some promiscuous multitude unworthy of the name of people. . . where there is no justice, then most certainly it follows that there is no republic where there is no justice.

Further, justice is that virtue which gives every one his due. Where, then, is the justice of man, when he deserts the true God and yields himself to impure demons? Is this to give every man his due? Or is he who keeps back a piece of ground from the purchaser, and gives it to a man who has no right to it, unjust, while he who keeps back himself from God who made him, and serves wicked spirits, just?

And where there is not that justice whereby the one supreme God rules the obedient city according to His grace, so that it sacrifices to none but Him, and whereby, in all the citizens of this obedient city, the soul consequently rules the body and reason the vices in the rightful order, so that, as the individual just man, so also the community and people of the just, live by faith, which works by love, that love whereby man loves God as he ought to be loved, and his nieghbour as himself - there, I say, there is not an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and by a community of interests. (City of God, Book XIX, 21)

Thus, in fact, justice has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ. (City of God, Book II, 21)

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