So if California burns, you send your high priest (in carbon -belching Air Force One, but never mind) to the bone-dry land to offer up, on behalf of the repentant congregation, a $1 billion burnt offering called a “climate resilience fund.” Ah, settled science in action.

-Charles Krauthammer

Climate-change proponents have made their cause a matter of fealty and faith. For folks who pretend to be brave carriers of the scientific ethic, there’s more than a tinge of religion in their jeremiads.

  If you whore after other gods, the Bible tells us, “the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit” (Deuteronomy 11).

  Sounds like California. Except that today there’s a new god, the Earth Mother. And a new set of sins — burning coal and driving a fully equipped F-150.

-Charles Krauthammer

Throughout the ages, something deep in man's psyche has made him receptive to apocalyptic warnings that the end of the world is nigh.

  And almost all of us, whether we like it or not, are imbued with feelings of guilt and a sense of sin. How much less uncomfortable it is, how much more convenient, to divert attention away from our individual sins and reasons to feel guilty, and to sublimate them in collective guilt and collective sin.

-Nigel Lawson

The world’s religions “have never overlooked the part played in civilization by a sense of guilt,” which is why they seek “to redeem mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.”

-Sigmund Freud

Environmental Sins of Today and the Future affect mostly air and water pollution from current industry operations. Environmental Sins of the Present and Future also include Climate Change, a political hot potato that is increasingly unpopular in the depths of high unemployment.

-Jon Anderson

The analogy between Indulgences and Carbon Credits is very good, but especially as both create a source of income for those who identify and define the problem, exploit the guilt, and offer a solution. They also do nothing to ameliorate the supposed problems, the amount of sinning or the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere from human sources. -Dr. Tim Ball

"The Pardoner, a seller of indulgences, is a complete and shameless rogue; but Chaucer, not content with exposing his impudence, shows how good he was at his job and how powerfully he preached against sinfulness. The Pardoner had also been taught to use the figure of death to scare his hearers." -Paul Johnson

Despite the potential for abuse, the concept of paying others to compensate for our environmental sins can be a valuable tool in helping reduce carbon emissions. -Carbon Offsets: The Indispensable Indulgence by Richard Conniff

Religious Indulgences...

  Like other pre-Enlightenment belief systems, it posits a prelapsarian state of grace, a pristine, innocent, nature-harmonious Rousseau-ean past which has been corrupted by modernity, industrialisation and capitalism, notwithstanding their having wrought in just 250 years an improvement in the human condition unprecedented in previous millennia.

  It holds that the restoration of environmental equilibrium, the reversal of Man’s Fall from the Garden of Eden, requires above all sacrifice and submission to an elite, who will dispense indulgences – aka ‘carbon’-credits – while intolerantly silencing and excommunicating the heretics.

The point of entry into the world of Catholic ritual is the Mass, the main worship ceremony of the Church.

Unfortunately, Earth Day for many has become yet another narcoleptic occasion to enact pointless environmental rituals while denouncing the greed and excesses they also find themselves ankle deep in. -Michael DeJong

On Ash Wednesday (the day after Shrove Tuesday and the start of lent) Christians remember Jesus - they go to church and have the sign of the cross marked on their foreheads in ash.

Ritual is an action or actions, performed in a prescribed order, which give greater reverence to worship... Ritual often gives the laity an opportunity to participate in an authentic way in worship.

Holidays, feasts and fasts are a significant part of Christian religious practice. The feast days celebrate joyous historical events, such as the birth and resurrection of Christ.

Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment and financial ruin.

-David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

We are in a new Inquisition. Self-appointed censors try to stamp out any idea or word that they don’t wish to be aired — in the pursuit of a new race, class, gender, and environment orthodoxy.

  Hounding out people with different views is seen by the Left as a necessary means to achieve its supposedly noble goals — just like the Spanish Inquisitioners who claimed God was on their side as they went after religiously “incorrect” Jews, Muslims, and heretics.

-Victor Davis Hanson

When reality stops cooperating with the faith, someone must get the blame, and it can never be the faith itself. And this is where the hunt for heretics within and without begins.

-Jonah Goldberg

But whereas -- after an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine...

-Recantation of Galileo, June 22, 1633

Coronavirus: Useful in Exterminating Climate Change Skeptics...

  "Don’t take this the wrong way but if you were a young, hardline environmentalist looking for the ultimate weapon against climate change, you could hardly design anything better than coronavirus.

  Unlike most other such diseases, it kills mostly the old who, let’s face it, are more likely to be climate sceptics."

"It was established doctrine that witches were not witches by their own volition, but by Satan’s, and so burning them at the stake would purify them by pain so they could enter Heaven. The Church actually believed, and led the populace to believe, that it was doing witches a favor by torturing them and burning them to death."

-Paul Johnson

Many in the climate change community have condemned what they call “skeptics,” often to the point of declaring them de facto criminals and assigning them to the same category as Holocaust deniers.

  They tell us that “the science is settled” and that we should shut up.

-Rand Simberg

A divinity called Gaia now receives the prayers and invocations of a vast sodality of devout worshippers. The new religion is here, a resurgent faith, as George Will writes, “in man-made global warming [which] is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence.”

James Lovelock: environmentalism has become a religion... Scientist behind the Gaia hypothesis says environment movement does not pay enough attention to facts and he was too certain in the past about rising temperatures.

It is the quasi-religion of green alarmism and global salvationism, of which the climate change dogma is the prime example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege. -Nigel Lawson

“I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use … The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air.” -James Lovelock

The truth is, scientists needn’t even crown themselves. Liberals are quite happy to plan the coronation for them. Spiritually-impoverished liberals all but demand that scientists serve as their gurus, prophets and political advisers. -Rachel Lu

Self Esteem Addicts...

  Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.

  They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

  "What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."

In 1962, Rachel Carson helped kick off the rise of a new religion, environmentalism, and with it, the deaths of many in the Third World with her book "Silent Spring."

John Kerry tells climate faithful: 'None of you need to be converted'