Earth Day Is Easter For Pagan Environmentalist Tree Huggers

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript –  If you want to think about this literally and figuratively, what was it, if you watch Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto, the nutjobs that were ripping hearts out of people and ripping livers out and cutting heads off at the top of that tower were holding those items they ripped out of those sacrificial people to what?  The sky.  They were trying to get the rain gods to cooperate.  They were trying to get the sun god to cooperate.  They were practicing what then, through human sacrifice, which environmentalists today are only too happy to practice?  They just don’t rip our hearts out or cut our heads off yet.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Well, the way Mr. Turley explains this is that the environmentalist offers to the atheist, agnostic, whale-humper, frog-licker, tree huggers, what have you, offers to them a resurrection of sorts.  The resurrection is, if you do what the environmentalists say, then we can heal the Earth because man has destroyed it, we’ve sinned against it, and we can heal the Earth.  In healing it, we can bring it back from the dead.  It is an allegory for the resurrection of Christ.  Basically environmentalism, as you just pointed out, is a pagan religion.  That’s exactly what it is.  It’s populated by cult-like whackos who meander about in faithful observance of the canons and principles and teachings of it, don’t they?  They sure do.  So yesterday was Easter for tree-huggers, Earth Day.  He writes about it:

[reading]

Around the twenty-second of every April, I must admit that I do feel a certain affinity with Ebenezer Scrooge as he was interrogated by his nephew, Fred. “Christmas a humbug, uncle! You don’t mean that, I am sure.” And while I certainly demur from his assessment of Christmas, I am in agreement with old Scrooge that calendrical commemorations shape effectually our lives, and not always for the better. [Mike: Then he gets into how this relates to Earth Day.]

[private FP-Monthly|FP-Yearly|FP-Yearly-WLK|FP-Yearly-So76]

Hence, Christ’s resurrection was from the beginning bound up with cosmic significance. The earliest Christian confessions (1 Cor 8:6; Phil 2:11; Col 1:15-20; Eph 1:3-14; Jn 1:3) pronounce Christ’s exaltation entailing Christ’s Lordship over all creation (cf. Rom 4:17). Paul’s letter to the Corinthians describes God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ in what biblical scholar Greg Sterling calls prepositional metaphysics, where the dynamics of the cosmos were described with terms like ‘from,’ ‘in,’ and ‘through.’ Thus Paul says: “For us, there is one God the Father, from (ek) whom are all things and we in (eis) him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through (dia) whom are all things and we through (dia) him” (1 Cor 8:6). [Mike: Then he goes on a little bit more the theology of it.]

However, the advent of the modern age represents a very different ecology, [Mike: The ecology that he is writing about is the ecology of Christ.] one that has been termed a ‘socialized ecology.’ Modernity theorist Anthony Giddens notes that the modern age is characterized by an unprecedented level of human intervention in the natural world. Irrigation and sanitation systems, drainage and sewer technologies, mechanisms for monitoring weather currents, and improved management of the natural environment collectively spare us from the droughts, contagions, floods, and other natural hazards that would have devastated pre-modern societies…

Socialized nature comes with two consequences. The first is the concern of the modern environmentalist: this new ecological order is producing what has been called a ‘greenhouse effect’… But, secondly, Giddens observes that the end of nature also entails the ‘end of morality.’ Insofar as social ecologies are organized and governed by modern scientific processes, they are comprised of mechanisms and operations considered value neutral and thus devoid of moral frames of reference…

Of further interest is in how these two consequences interact. Because social ecologies are devoid of any collectively recognized moral law, modern ‘morality’ becomes consequentialist, in that only coercion, compulsion, and extortion can provide a motivation for ethical conformity. This is where the alarmism of the apocalyptic predictions for global warming comes in, and why dissenting scientific opinions, represented most notably by MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen, are ignored if not ridiculed. The significance of the very possibility of imperilment is artificially inflated and immanentized in a world that operates according to consequentialist motives and risk assessment. But these consequences, it is asserted, can in fact be avoided if we apply the appropriate techniques. This is the importance of stressing the salvific significance of activities such as planting trees, recycling, and reducing our carbon footprints. This turn towards technique to remake positively our world extends from the very subjective processes by which we reinvent ourselves; the sovereign self supplies the therapeutic resources by which we can reinvent the planet.

And herein lies my concern with Earth Day and what its observance reveals about ourselves. Earth Day commemorates the orientation of sovereign individuals toward a socialized ecology devoid of morality, constituted by discourses and practices that entail consequentialist ethics and reconstructive techniques. As such, Earth Day and Easter represent two fundamentally different ecologies, what we might call a ‘modern ecology’ versus a ‘moral ecology.’ This is why I find various Christian attempts to ‘baptize’ Earth Day so forced. To the degree Earth Day is a temporal and practical extension of a socialized ecology devoid of morality, it renders irrelevant the cosmic claims of the Christian gospel. Christianity has always affirmed man’s capacity to destroy God’s creation, at the heart of which is the defilement of the image of God which we all bear. What Christianity has not done is accommodate such detrimental capacities to thoroughly secular and amoral frames of reference. Thus, given the incessantly secularized piety of Earth Day, the call to good stewardship over our environment begs the question: Which environment? Are we to be good stewards over an artificially crafted ecology governed by consequentialism and technique, or an inherently moral ecology that has been incorporated into the transformative life, death, and resurrection of Christ?

It is no coincidence that Easter became historically the preferred time for proselyte baptism. The baptismal ritual began with exorcisms over the water, which was associated with the kingdom of the dead in ancient mythology. As death was the domain of Satan, Cyril could speak of baptism as a victory over the demonic forces indwelling the waters (Catechetical Lectures, III:10)…

So what does Easter have to do with Earth Day? If we recover what Easter is really all about, then, well, nothing. Easter is not about recycling, but resurrection; it is not about saving the environment, but celebrating the one who already has. As Christians, we practice a Lenten fast not to reduce our carbon footprint, but to empty ourselves in a manner comparable to Christ’s kenosis, and to be filled with his presence through prayer and contemplation. We bless water, consecrate bread and wine, and plant gardens not for fear of an impending ecological Armageddon, but to prepare time and space for their future transfiguration when Christ returns, when God will be all in all.

The environmentalist offers to the atheist, agnostic, whale-humper, frog-licker, tree-hugger, what have you, offers to them a resurrection of sorts.  The resurrection is, if you do what the environmentalists say, then we can heal the Earth because man has destroyed it, we’ve sinned against it, and we can heal the Earth.  In healing it, we can bring it back from the dead.  It is an allegory for the resurrection of Christ.  Basically environmentalism, as you just pointed out, is a pagan religion.

And so, yes, I’ll say it and mean it: “Earth Day? Humbug!” And in its place, I’ll proclaim that greeting which resounds throughout the globe at the dawn of Easter morning, the beginning of the renewal of all things: “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” [/private]

[end reading]

Mike:  You can find this posted in today’s Pile of Prep at MikeChurch.com.  Just click on the Pile of Prep tab and that will lead you to this at The Imaginative Conservative.  His title is “Earth Day, a Humbug? From Resurrection to Recycling.”  What he’s basically talking about is the environmentalist has elevated the Earth and the worship of earthen things and ecology as a religion that has supplanted the actual religion and the person that actually is denoted in Christian religion as The One who actually did create all those things.  It is to Him that you are thankful, not to Mother Earth.  There is no Mother Earth.  The only Mother that I know of in the Christian canon is Mary.  That’s what he’s talking about.  I think he’s spot on.

I’ve always thought environmentalists and the nature Nazis, as I used to call them, I’ve always thought that they were basically observing a form of pagan religion.  If you want to think about this literally and figuratively, what was it, if you watch Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto, the nutjobs that were ripping hearts out of people and ripping livers out and cutting heads off at the top of that tower were holding those items they ripped out of those sacrificial people to what?  The sky.  They were trying to get the rain gods to cooperate.  They were trying to get the sun god to cooperate.  They were practicing what then, through human sacrifice, which environmentalists today are only too happy to practice?  They just don’t rip our hearts out or cut our heads off yet.

End Mike Church Show Transcript