Today as I sat in a waiting room a few seats away was a man who was saying to someone else how glad he was that Obama is taking us away from fossil fuels especially oil. Ordinarily anyone expressing such a view would stress the part about the greenhouse gasses and pollution but this guy took not only that but was fixated on yet another point which I hadn’t really heard specifically stated before but assumed it to be part of the “religion of environmentalism”. His view was that oil has a negative psychological influence on us as a culture. He sees it as an evil or a sin – with the “Earth goddess” as the one blasphemed by it no doubt. Further along it came out that it has a corrupting effect.
To anyone casually knowledgeable about American history will recall that this was one of the arguments against alcohol. To the crusaders which included many rich elitists who felt that alcohol subtracted from our efficiency in production and that it created or encouraged the masses to behave like rabble and not strive to be as refined as they were. Their allies like Carrie Nation and Billy Sunday who saw it as a moral crusade of all Christian people viewed it as a sin against God and everything down to motherhood.
It must be recognized that in the “environmentalist religion” which includes so much of the New Age movement (which is another kind of religion) the Earth is the center as is God to Christians and the sin is pollution which is tantamount to blasphemy or a direct sin against the Earth Goddess. There can be no doubt about this and I doubt if many of the converts to this brand of paganism ever give it a thought but this is exactly what it amounts to.