Heat and Light

I don't know the truth behind the current anthropogenic global warming scare. Maybe it's based on some kind of reality, maybe it's partly true but not in the way presented or maybe it's just completely hyped up and 'the science', as it often does now, has followed the funding. What I do know, though, is that it is a spiritual distraction.

Let's be clear about one thing first of all. We should obviously respect the environment or, as it should properly be called, the Creation. We should respect our natural environment, we should respect our intellectual environment and, most of all, we should respect our spiritual environment. But the relentless focus on the physical only points to how little we respect the other environments in which we live and move and have our being, and how much we damage them. Chiefly, we damage the spiritual which we either don't acknowledge at all or else see largely in the light of the priorities of this world. 

I am sure the climate is changing somewhat but isn't that always the case? It's reasonable to think that human activity since the Industrial Revolution might have contributed in some way to this, and I would be the first to decry the pollution industrialisation has caused. We do need to change. That is a basic and obvious fact. But what do we need to change? Our cars and boilers and and diet and habits of over-consumption or something more fundamental? Here I should say that I don't have a car, don't bother with heating until the temperature is truly low and am not much of a consumer of stuff. Also, I haven't eaten meat for years but, quite frankly, none of these things mean much. It is obvious that the idea of climate change is being used to advance another purpose. Amongst other things, it is being used as a secular religion to keep people away from developing a proper relationship with God and attending to their salvation. Concern with it eats up energies that should be turned inwards towards God and causes these energies to dissipate into agitation and self-righteousness to no real effect. Great heat but very little light as you might say, given the subject.

Then it is being used to attack basic freedoms, impose control and eventually reduce human beings to lines of data.  This is what it is really about. Control. Once you realise that you can free yourself of any worries you might have about climate change. Do you think most people really care? Those at the top are using those at the bottom to advance their own ends. Those activists at the bottom are the ones Yeats described as "the worst - full of passionate intensity", convinced of their righteousness but animated by anger and resentment. Many, no doubt, mean well but they are being manipulated.

This does not mean we should treat our world as a resource to be plundered until there is nothing left of it, but the concern with climate change is tinkering with effects. We need to look at causes and the cause of our disconnect with nature is our disconnect with God. Even if, by some miracle, we got the climate to behave just as we would like it to behave (and what exactly is the ideal temperature?) we would be no better off in terms of our interaction with the world. We live in a state of complete alienation and that will not change until we turn back to God and see ourselves as spiritual beings whose fulfilment and duty lies in loving and serving the Creator.

Climate change, real or exaggerated, is a complete red herring. What we should be aware of is the agenda of control it is being used to advance. We should also know that this is a materialistic preoccupation. That is not to say we can use the world greedily or selfishly for that is even more materialistic. The world is the creation of God, that which he looked upon and saw was good. But don't separate it from its Maker. Use it, we were meant to cultivate the wilderness, but use it with love and respect as a good steward. Then things like climate change fade into insignificance. Get your relationship right with God and your relationship with the world will automatically follow on from that.

Anyone who takes this position must be prepared to be assailed by a barrage of statistics proving he is wrong. I would never say one should ignore reliable data but data is open to interpretation and figures can be selected to serve an agenda. But, there is something more. Those on the spiritual path must be guided by intuition. Now, intuition is very good at the big picture but it sometimes falls short on the details.  We don't have to know how and why the climate change agenda is a stalking horse to bring about some other desired end but we can see that is precisely what it is and one of the reasons for that is this. Climate concern is relentlessly pushed as the correct thing to believe for all right-thinking, well-motivated people who have the good of humanity at heart but I have to tell you that nothing that is truly good is promoted by the mainstream nowadays. We are in a spiritual war in which the spiritually harmful is constantly promoted at the expense of the spiritual healthy. It isn't right to defile or exploit our planet. We should reduce our consumption merely as a matter of putting spiritual things first. Our materialism and over-consumption are sins, no doubt about it. But the climate change agenda is just the latest example of deceiving people by leading them into a false good. The precise details behind this operation may be elusive but an obvious effect is the tightening of control and reduction of freedom. We are being coerced into giving up our freedoms on many fronts now.  Just as we have recently accepted restrictions in the name of saving our health so we will shortly be required to accept more restrictions in the name of saving the planet. But what is really behind that?

It's not increasing heat we should be worried about but fading light.