Earth Day was yesterday – after already having 53 of them since 1973, did anyone notice #54 other than a few platitudes on the news? WMUR (NH’s only TV station) “greenwashed” it with a package that was more normal “pick up the trash” than anything else. Even the now-pablum-filled TreeHugger could only roust up a meaningless few paragraphs.
Sidenote: I just went over to TH to grab the URL for it and it is gone. So I left this comment on another post knowing that the moderators would see it:
I just noticed that yesterday’s obligatory Earth Day post (with comments turned off) is now missing? Seriously, has the Movement become so embarrassing that even TH is dumping it?
Heh!
Time Magazine, however, is still full bore on it, letting the rest of us know it’s alive and well and worthy to be an actual religion. A secular religion but with all of the trappings of a God-fearing one (reformatted, emphasis mine):
The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday
Earth Day is upon us—that forlorn little non-holiday that some years sandwiches itself between Easter and Passover, or other years trails in the wake of those “real” holidays. If the Super Bowl is America’s unofficial national day of celebration, Earth Day is the collective yawn that brings a shrug. No recipes offer Earth Day chips and dips to serve when friends and beloveds gather in celebration of the miracle of a living planet. Because they don’t. Not even ours.
For the two of us environmentalists—one of us nominally Jewish, the other a recovering Catholic—we find the ill-defined nature of the only day honoring the place that makes life itself possible more than a little sacrilegious. So, on this 53rd Earth Day we thought it useful to pose what a real Earth Day should represent and how it could form a central time for a new approach to worship.
New approach? And the question being begged is worship WHAT? Never fear, mes amis, they are willing to tell us and want us to adopt:
…So, what would an earth-reverent belief system look like with Earth Day at its center?
To begin with, let’s take a look at what established religions get right and where we might take a cue. Perhaps the first step might be, um, unearthing the nature-centered origins of our existing religious holidays. Most of us know in the back of our minds that Christmas and Hanukkah fall around the time of the winter solstice; that Easter and Passover are celebrated in tandem with the arrival of spring; that Sukkot and Diwali mark harvest and summer’s last warmth, and Eid follows the path of the moon. These holidays have origins in gratitude. Gratitude for the sun returning. Gratitude for the harvest that could avert the starvation winter might bring. Thanks for when it did avert it. We could conceivably reframe these holidays as days of thanks for what the natural world gives and reminders that our responsibility for what remains is an ongoing covenant.
Next, we might look at what religions do to help us form community and mark life’s important benchmarks: birth, maturity, marriage, and death. What if we were to come to celebrate these benchmarks for what they are biologically?…What if a book like that [the Torah] existed for the Earth? What if it were replete with hymns to this world of the living? What if it contained the stories of the prophets of natural earth knowledge—Darwin and Carson, Galileo and Humboldt? What if we came to mark those discoveries as the gradual opening of consciousness to the laws of nature. What if our Bible of the Natural World reenforced that a multiplicity of processes and phenomena still remain to be discovered? What if we used that book not to scold our children into following commandments but rather to light a path forward that encouraged discovery and reverence, and gratitude for the relationships that are this planetary spaceship’s life-support?
Sorry, now they’re sounding like many churches that have abandoned God and have decided to become a country club without the tennis courts, golf courses, and pools. Sorry, this is nothing more than “self-worship” bordering on an old religious type that has existed for centuries and is still around today: Paganism dressed up in green clothes. I would say that they even tried to co-opt America’s past events of religious fervor when they try this
…Likewise a whole new continent of scientific knowledge has been revealed to us since America’s first and second religious Great Awakenings. It seems perfectly reasonable and spiritual to us that in a New Great Awakening this new knowledge-continent be incorporated into a progressive wisdom of life, death, and the universe.
As expected, do you see any mention of GOD in that (and yes, go read the whole thing)? When they earlier used the word “gratitude”, did you notice that they never mentioned to WHOM gratitude was to be directed? And they have the gall to put themselves at the same level as God in this as both Awakenings were about worshipping God and not themselves (e.g., other humans) and their gnostic leanings here.
And the authors wrap it up with this:
…In short, we must make nature central to our belief system with Earth Day or any number of earth-focused ceremonial days serving as regular reminders of what we owe our home planet…We’ve got to convey to everyone that the planet whose rotation and revolution creates all 365 days is worthy of a recognition that spans all 365. Recognition of the planet was born in protest. Going forward it must be about reverence, about respect for the living world that makes human life, too, possible. Celebrating the whole world as a living miracle really should be more fun—and more win-win—than even the most-watched football game.
Sorry, I have my own belief system and no, I don’t own anything to our home planet” that is as inanimate as the rocks that the Grandson picks up to play with waiting for the school bus in the morning. And if our planet “was born in protest”, who or what was “our planet” protesting against? Again, this is ancient philosophy – trying to anthropomorphize something that isn’t by those that have rejected God (or as our Founders put it, “Nature’s God”).
But it shows that when one rejects God, they are open to believing in almost anything else. Including their own ideas.
But Skip! What about all this from Government about saving emissions (and falsely telling us they will save us money by FORCING us to do things their way and screwing with our appliances and cars again)? Yeah – don’t believe them. Again, we keep warning people that THESE kinds of people, in government with the power to boss us around and make our lives more and more miserable, are Watermelon Environmentalists: Green on the outside but Red on the inside. You know, like the Chinese Communist flag. They are greenwashing as well but not with products but demanding control over every speckle of our lives with “environmentalism and Save The Planet” as a cover.
It is always about control – and getting more and more of it by any means possible.
(H/T: Time)
