The Last Great Heresy

The global warming drumbeat feels like it’s gotten louder over the past year or so. What’s interesting about this to me isn’t the rise in the voice but the ‘authenticity’ it’s bringing this time around. Disagreement with the global warming hypothesis is one of the last great secular heresies you can engage in. Announce in a meeting at work that you’re an avowed atheist and people won’t even look up. Announce at a party that you think this global warming thing is a bunch of crap and you’ll get fingers poked into your chest. A little bit of science coupled with a little bit of fear and you’ve got a believer. The nice thing for the zealots is that there’s no shortage of apocalyptic predictions.

This is a secular religion that’s undergone some repackaging and rebranding to make it palatable for those that can’t digest belief in a supreme deity. God is an abstraction but you can hold a handful of earth. Whereas god kills indiscriminately when the earth does it now it has to be a result of something we’ve done. Scientists politely refer to those that don’t accept the hypothesis as ‘irresponsible’, read “sinner”. For me, the fun part of all this is watching people twist the apocalypse concept into the scariest scenario they can construct. After a while it becomes more about the elaborate play they’re composing in their head than the facts at hand. Being really scared tends to grant importance to life when you fail at constructing it on your own.

Ares