Old Sins and New Sins
In the book, “God Wants You Dead,” Paul and I talk about the nature of various religious and political philosophies and conclude that they are all examples of the same sort of ideological beast. Our “proof” for this comes from the ways that such entities compete with each other to occupy the same niches in the human psyche – the way the rise of a secular “ism” can drive out a religious “ism” and vice versa. We have also noted, both in the aforementioned book and in various blog posts, that a new hybrid of Socialism and Environmentalism is on the rise in the ongoing contest to be the world’s most powerful religion.
This new ideological organism, that I sometimes refer to as “Envirofundamentalism,” has many parallels to other religions. It has multiple Hell/Armageddon scenarios of global warming, ozone layer depletion, poisoned seas, genetically modified food monsters, etc. It has its own versions of a kosher diet with organic produce, free range meat, vegetarianism, and the like. It requires its sacrifices of time and energy to various odd rituals such as separating your trash into multiple categories. It even has its own version of Pascal’s Wager called the “Precautionary Principle.”
One of the advantages that this new religion currently has, is that it is not generally recognized as a religion. It is therefor more successful at influencing even those governments that are trying hard to maintain a separation of church and state. It has succeeded best so far in Europe where its biggest competitor, Christianity, had been previously weakened by the various “isms” clashing in World War II, but it has since spread to every other continent and is doing quite well.
In a previous blog post entitled “Pope Blasts Marx – Misses Gore,” I talked about a letter written by the Pope that showed his recognition of the way in which supposedly secular philosophies can compete directly with Christianity. However, I noted that he seemed to be missing the biggest threat of Environmentalism being such a competitor. But perhaps my criticism of his strategy came too soon. A new development has just occurred indicating that maybe the Pope recognized this competition but had another strategy in mind all along. (Either that or His Holiness reads this blog and I was the one that tipped him off :-)
What I am referring to is a recent news stories that the Catholic church is planning on increasing the number of deadly sins:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=4424390
Three of the new “sins” to make the short list should be quite familiar to any faithful believer in the tenants of this new hybrid socialist/environmentalist religion:
- Environmental Irresponsibility
- Genetic Engineering
- Inequality of Wealth
So it is looking very much like the Catholic Church has decided to follow a strategy of “If you can’t beat ‘em – join ‘em.”
This is by no means a new way to go for a religion that started out as an offshoot of Judaism, granted divinity to its prophet to compete with the divinity granted to the Roman Emperor by his followers, folded its prophet/god back into its monotheistic GOD as well as an all encompassing over-soul by borrowing from Eastern religious ideas, co-opted other European religions by adopting their icons in the form of various angels and demons while stealing all of their high holidays and renaming them, drifted far into the secular world of bloody warfare and political machinations, and returned to the spirit of the recorded words of its prophet only when too many translations of those words into languages people could actually read finally existed for the discrepancies to continue to be ignored.
While it is certainly a long strange road from Genesis 9:2-3
And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.
to a Catholic church that may learn to embrace animal rights – stranger things have certainly happened in the world of Collective Idea-Organisms.
This is a very interesting play for Catholicism to make and it will be fun to see how it plays out.
Well, perhaps “fun” is not the right word. Western civilization has made great progress through a delicate trick of balancing religious and secular powers against each other and leaving space for individual freedom and innovation in between. If this new attempt at an alliance between Catholicism and Envirofundamentalism makes more people notice the similarities between the two, it could produce more resistance to the influences of such idea-organisms on secular governments – and that would be a good thing. However, it could just as easily be a path back to the bad old days of people being ruled by a single united idea-organism – a church/state combination that called for the death of all unbelievers. The balance that we have achieved may be much more precarious than people realize.
It remains to be seen whether or not we can continue down the path of progress that western civilization has only relatively recently learned to tread, or if we will return to the big old sins of waging collective war on individual liberty and achievement. The unification of a powerful old icon for enslaving minds and the hottest new “up and comer” among such icons is a prospect to be greatly feared by those who believe in individualism.