Welcome to Mystery Babylon
Timothy Birdnow
Neo-paganism, Earth worship, and the "rights" of nature at Durban.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2011/12/10/global-warming-hysteria-pushing-rights-of-nature-at-durban/
I've warned about this in the past, most notably in my American Thinker essay "Return of the Old Gods; a Challenge for Green Evangelicals".
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/08/the_return_of_the_old_gods_a_c.html
Wesley Smith at Second Hand Smoke pulls this section from the draft document at Durban;
Presented to the Conference of the Parties for adoption at its seventeenth session,” pp. 138-139:
Impacts:…
38. Ensuring the full respect of human rights, including the inherent rights of indigenous peoples, women, children, migrants and all vulnerable sectors;
39. [Recognizing promoting and defending the rights of nature to guarantee harmony between humanity and nature ensuring the prevalence of all elements of nature over market interests].
40. [Ensuring that ecological functions of Mother Earth will not be commodified inorder to guarantee the rights of nature;]
end excerpt.
Huh! The "rights of nature to guarantee harmoney between humanity and nature"? What kind of nature worship drivel is this? The "ecological functionf of Mother Earth will not be commodified inorder to guarantee the rights of nature"?
Nature has never been so kind. There have been mass extinctions of creatures; five major such events in the course of biological history. By what right does "Nature" act as guarantor of harmony between us? Nature is not benevolent, but rather really quite a bitch, making life miserable for those sad creatures forced to endure her moods. Nature gives us starvation, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, disease, hypothermia, frostbite, sunburn. Mother Nature is a capricious one, turning on her children and devouring them with impunity. The "commodified" civilization complained of by Durbanity was thrust upon us because our dear old mother refused to act as an acceptable parent. WE had to make our own way, largely orphaned while mom enjoyed herself. Civilization is a response to the many survival pressures imposed on us from without. We learned to build, to travel, to go out into the world precisely because we HAD to. Anyone who thinks civilization is the source of alienation and that nature is the answer has no conception of the reality of the universe. The universe is our enemy, our antagonist. It does not work in a manner that functions to our benefit but to our detriment, and what we have has been wrung out of nature despite itself.
We are fragile entities, requiring oxygen, adequate air pressure, no poisons in air or water or food. We require water - clean water, salt free (yet most of the Earth's water is saline). We require food, which is hard to get and spoils quickly. We require a specific temperature range, and suffer and die outside of it. We require. sleep. We require protection from other creatures and from our own selves. We require all manner of things. If Nature forged us, she did a really crappy job of it, making us so utterly dependent on her and yet failing to provide except quite grudgingly for those needs.
No, Nature is not our goddess! She is at best a cold-hearted, soul-less bitch indifferent to our welfare.
All we owe Nature is what is pleasing and good FOR US. Granted, destroying the environment, wiping out creatures, etc. is not ultimately good for us. But we do not owe it to Nature.
We owe it to ourselves. More importantly, we owe it to God, who is above Nature.
Mother Nature is such a regal bitch because she is corrupted, cut off from the higher power of the Creator. Christianity and Judaism say that Nature is fallen because Man is fallen. You see, Nature exists for Humanity's benefit, not Humanity for Nature. Nature is but a vehicle, a medium in which Man dwells. It is a hard, bitter medium because Man is a hard, bitter creature. We exist in a realm fitting to our ways, according to the Bible. Suffering and death are the end products of Sin.
But even if one does not believe in a transcendent God, in Sin, in anything outside of the natural realm, one should still understand that nature is itself little more than a mechanical process. Perhaps of unbelievable complexity, but it is nothing more than the workings out of certain fundamental laws. It has no sense of good or evil, or any independence outside of itself. It is a dead thing, ultimately. Oh, it may have generated living tissue and perhaps even the human brain, it's finest joke of all. (Give us a brain in a pointless universe where nothing matters so we can think about our futility.) But if one looks to Nature one sees something born of fire and destined to either return to a great black emptiness of matter (the Cosmic Egg) or suffer heat death and exist forever in abject darkness, where not even wailing and knashing of teeth will be heard. It is futility.
Outside of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob there is little to set one's hopes on in Nature. Outside of God the best we can hope for is to place ourselves in a position where we can COMPEL Nature to our and our decendent's benefit. There is no magical incantations that will make the old gods come alive and bless us. We have to advance civilization or fall back into the chaos of pre-existence.
And yet these people, the Gang Green as I like to call them, the Environmentalists, struggle in their hatred of civilization and the fruits thereof, dreaming of restoring some mythical pastoral paradise. They hate "the machine" yet are oblivious to the fact that the machine exists because Nature herself is little more than a machine, and we have had to counter Nature with our own construct. If our civilization seems artificial, well, it IS but out of necessity. Nature has never been kind to us or gentle with us. We have had to make our own destiny on this Earth.
And these dreams of paradise, where do they come from? They are residual memories of some place better, I would argue. Yet for insane reasons so many reject that place, reject the one who can give us that place back, in favor of this crazed neo-pagan worldview, this attempt to restore something that never existed here. Because we have had to thwart Nature we have grown too much in the habit of thinking we can restore paradise. The people at Durban are attempting to do just that, only a paradise without God. They do this by elevating the mechanical Nature to deity, and then worship that.
And old fashioned pagan nature worship is little different from Scientism, whereby nature is worshipped without the pious words. People like Richard Dawkins place science on the highest pedestal, believing that all comes from the goddess of reason worshipped by the revolutionaries in France. But worshipping Man's ability to understand and manipulate Nature is no different from worshipping Nature itself, it just adds Man to the top of the pole, deifying human reason.
But it is equal madness. There really is only one good way out of that trap.
But in the end, too few want to accept that path, because it means fundamentally re-evaluating our position in not just this universe but in all possible universes. It is a humbling experience.
At any rate, Mother Nature has no rights. Nature is dust, and unto dust she shall return - or to photons.
Welcome to Mystery Babylon!
Neo-paganism, Earth worship, and the "rights" of nature at Durban.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2011/12/10/global-warming-hysteria-pushing-rights-of-nature-at-durban/
I've warned about this in the past, most notably in my American Thinker essay "Return of the Old Gods; a Challenge for Green Evangelicals".
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/08/the_return_of_the_old_gods_a_c.html
Wesley Smith at Second Hand Smoke pulls this section from the draft document at Durban;
Presented to the Conference of the Parties for adoption at its seventeenth session,” pp. 138-139:
Impacts:…
38. Ensuring the full respect of human rights, including the inherent rights of indigenous peoples, women, children, migrants and all vulnerable sectors;
39. [Recognizing promoting and defending the rights of nature to guarantee harmony between humanity and nature ensuring the prevalence of all elements of nature over market interests].
40. [Ensuring that ecological functions of Mother Earth will not be commodified inorder to guarantee the rights of nature;]
end excerpt.
Huh! The "rights of nature to guarantee harmoney between humanity and nature"? What kind of nature worship drivel is this? The "ecological functionf of Mother Earth will not be commodified inorder to guarantee the rights of nature"?
Nature has never been so kind. There have been mass extinctions of creatures; five major such events in the course of biological history. By what right does "Nature" act as guarantor of harmony between us? Nature is not benevolent, but rather really quite a bitch, making life miserable for those sad creatures forced to endure her moods. Nature gives us starvation, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, disease, hypothermia, frostbite, sunburn. Mother Nature is a capricious one, turning on her children and devouring them with impunity. The "commodified" civilization complained of by Durbanity was thrust upon us because our dear old mother refused to act as an acceptable parent. WE had to make our own way, largely orphaned while mom enjoyed herself. Civilization is a response to the many survival pressures imposed on us from without. We learned to build, to travel, to go out into the world precisely because we HAD to. Anyone who thinks civilization is the source of alienation and that nature is the answer has no conception of the reality of the universe. The universe is our enemy, our antagonist. It does not work in a manner that functions to our benefit but to our detriment, and what we have has been wrung out of nature despite itself.
We are fragile entities, requiring oxygen, adequate air pressure, no poisons in air or water or food. We require water - clean water, salt free (yet most of the Earth's water is saline). We require food, which is hard to get and spoils quickly. We require a specific temperature range, and suffer and die outside of it. We require. sleep. We require protection from other creatures and from our own selves. We require all manner of things. If Nature forged us, she did a really crappy job of it, making us so utterly dependent on her and yet failing to provide except quite grudgingly for those needs.
No, Nature is not our goddess! She is at best a cold-hearted, soul-less bitch indifferent to our welfare.
All we owe Nature is what is pleasing and good FOR US. Granted, destroying the environment, wiping out creatures, etc. is not ultimately good for us. But we do not owe it to Nature.
We owe it to ourselves. More importantly, we owe it to God, who is above Nature.
Mother Nature is such a regal bitch because she is corrupted, cut off from the higher power of the Creator. Christianity and Judaism say that Nature is fallen because Man is fallen. You see, Nature exists for Humanity's benefit, not Humanity for Nature. Nature is but a vehicle, a medium in which Man dwells. It is a hard, bitter medium because Man is a hard, bitter creature. We exist in a realm fitting to our ways, according to the Bible. Suffering and death are the end products of Sin.
But even if one does not believe in a transcendent God, in Sin, in anything outside of the natural realm, one should still understand that nature is itself little more than a mechanical process. Perhaps of unbelievable complexity, but it is nothing more than the workings out of certain fundamental laws. It has no sense of good or evil, or any independence outside of itself. It is a dead thing, ultimately. Oh, it may have generated living tissue and perhaps even the human brain, it's finest joke of all. (Give us a brain in a pointless universe where nothing matters so we can think about our futility.) But if one looks to Nature one sees something born of fire and destined to either return to a great black emptiness of matter (the Cosmic Egg) or suffer heat death and exist forever in abject darkness, where not even wailing and knashing of teeth will be heard. It is futility.
Outside of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob there is little to set one's hopes on in Nature. Outside of God the best we can hope for is to place ourselves in a position where we can COMPEL Nature to our and our decendent's benefit. There is no magical incantations that will make the old gods come alive and bless us. We have to advance civilization or fall back into the chaos of pre-existence.
And yet these people, the Gang Green as I like to call them, the Environmentalists, struggle in their hatred of civilization and the fruits thereof, dreaming of restoring some mythical pastoral paradise. They hate "the machine" yet are oblivious to the fact that the machine exists because Nature herself is little more than a machine, and we have had to counter Nature with our own construct. If our civilization seems artificial, well, it IS but out of necessity. Nature has never been kind to us or gentle with us. We have had to make our own destiny on this Earth.
And these dreams of paradise, where do they come from? They are residual memories of some place better, I would argue. Yet for insane reasons so many reject that place, reject the one who can give us that place back, in favor of this crazed neo-pagan worldview, this attempt to restore something that never existed here. Because we have had to thwart Nature we have grown too much in the habit of thinking we can restore paradise. The people at Durban are attempting to do just that, only a paradise without God. They do this by elevating the mechanical Nature to deity, and then worship that.
And old fashioned pagan nature worship is little different from Scientism, whereby nature is worshipped without the pious words. People like Richard Dawkins place science on the highest pedestal, believing that all comes from the goddess of reason worshipped by the revolutionaries in France. But worshipping Man's ability to understand and manipulate Nature is no different from worshipping Nature itself, it just adds Man to the top of the pole, deifying human reason.
But it is equal madness. There really is only one good way out of that trap.
But in the end, too few want to accept that path, because it means fundamentally re-evaluating our position in not just this universe but in all possible universes. It is a humbling experience.
At any rate, Mother Nature has no rights. Nature is dust, and unto dust she shall return - or to photons.
Welcome to Mystery Babylon!
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 8:50 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home