THE COLUMN: Waiting for GODot

This week, the-Pipeline.org continues our series addressing the cult of "climate change," a new religion that apes traditional faiths, particularly Christianity, maliciously concocted by people who mean to harm western civilization and who use the cudgels of "compassion" and "concern" with which to do it. Please follow our series as we debunk the claims made by the "climate" apocalypticists and their media allies.

What do the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have in common with each other? Besides some form of putative monotheism, quite a bit, as it turns out. Each relies on "prophecy" to justify the validity of its teachings. Each has a canon of sacred scriptures, dictated by the Almighty whether directly or through human intermediaries, which its scholars and adherents pore over in order to discover hidden meanings and glean new insights into the human condition. Each regards itself as the sole repository of truth, to the exclusion of all other rites and practices. Each, in its own way, believes that it alone is God's prescription for the good and moral life, handed down on high via (pick one) Moses, Jesus of Nazareth, or Muhammad. Each anathematizes heretics. Each defines sin and regards its expiation as essential to eternal salvation. And while they share many of the same cast of characters, each is dogmatically exclusionary of the others. 

"Depart ye; it is unclean; depart, depart, touch not."

Let us now add a fourth faith to this trinity: "man-made climate change." Its professed goals might be quite different, but in practice, it is indistinguishable from the other three. Computer projections forecasting certain doom are its "prophecies" and climatologists are its Hoseas, Jeremiahs, and Isaiahs. Apocalyptic books such as Al Gore's Earth in the Balance and his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, are Holy Writ. And Greta Thunberg, the Swedish school striker, is its embodiment of Bernadette and Joan of Arc. It is not enough to believe in some of what its votaries say: one must believe in all of it, and the only way to salvation is through its teachings. Time, of course, is of the essence. 

Early Believers came to their faiths in part because of their assurances of immediate relief from tribulation. In the early days of rabbinical Judaism, which more or less coincide with the origins of Christianity, the Jews cycled through various messiahs, including Jesus (the Ebionites, who accepted Jesus as the prophesied messiah but kept the Mosaic Law, existed for the first three or four centuries A.D.), and Simon bar-Kokhba, who led the final rebellion of the Jewish Wars against the Romans between 132 and 136. The immediate goal was the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel, according to the prophecies.

Similarly, many early Christians believed in the aftermath of the Crucifixion that the Second Coming was imminent and that Jesus, too, would expel the Romans and establish a new kingdom on earth. (They had thought that even before his execution as a political criminal by Pontius Pilate.) The early ferocious appeal of Islam was that it was inevitable and invincible, and it inspired its followers to a stunning conquest of the Sassanid Persian empire, much Byzantine territory, the remnant of the Western Roman Empire in North Africa and Spain -- until it was stopped dead in its tracks by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732, a stunning, almost inconceivable blow to Arab and Muslim pride, as we read in the contemporaneous Islamic accounts of the battle. Call it the "fierce urgency of now."

"My lips are contaminated by sin, and I live among people whose lips are contaminated by sin."

So it is with "climate change." The new Kingdom of Heaven will arrive if only we follow the scriptures; otherwise, we have only a limited time left to survive. That these predictions have been to date entirely wrong doesn't matter. The appeal of prophetic faith conveniently lies in its non-specificity. The Messiah will come... some day. The risen Jesus will return... some day. The whole world will become the dar al-Islam... someday. The goal is a state of permanent fear with a chimerical hope of relief. 

One particularly salient characteristic of all faiths is that reversals on the battlefield -- for the history of religion is also the history of warfare -- are a sign of insufficient fidelity. Reading the accounts of the Crusades by both Christian and Muslim chroniclers, the historian is struck by how often the fervent believers on both sides (and they were nothing if not fervent) resorted to prayer whenever they were in extremis. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't; sometimes they won and sometimes they were slaughtered to the last man, woman, and child in the name of the other guy's god. But it never worked for both sides simultaneously.

Similarly, for the "climate change" faithful (whether sincere or, more likely, cynical), every natural disaster is proof of the reality of their anthropomorphic superstition: low temperatures, high temperatures, floods, droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes, forest fires, soil erosion, and hungry kids in Africa and Asia can all be attributed to the anger of Mother Gaia at her misbehaving parasitical offspring. "Climate change," in fact, is the perfect faith: everything reinforces it, and nothing disproves it. 

Nothing "green" came from Mt. Sinai.

This is not to denigrate traditional religions of any and all stripes: belief is belief and facts are facts and sometimes never the twain shall meet. Thus the mystery that lies at the heart of all religious observance. But new faiths have a higher bar than old ones. And "climate change" -- a Jonestown-like cult rife with exaggerated claims and manipulated documentation that brooks no opposition or dissent -- has a very high bar indeed.

Last week, we explained how "climate change" is a malignant, anti-human hoax; a false apocalypse appealing to people's basest instincts; the fatal consequences of the "net-zero" policies currently destroying national economies around the world; the movement's cultist mentality; the rush to blame the Canadian forest fires on it; and how in many ways it's a return to primitive paganism. This week, we'll consider its fundamental unprovability; the mortal threat it poses to our food supply; and, most ominously, its inherently fascistic nature as it digs its hooks ever deeper into the world's governments. Please join us.