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‘Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you,’ Saint Peter advised. Difficult to do, even in the most religious of times. Where does our anxiety run to in the most irreligious of times? Heads, empty of old-time religion, are turning, I suggest, as of old, to idolatry.
Atonement for global warming is made to mother-earth-god Gaia by building modern-day idols. Follies in the form of useless solar and wind farms. Everyone knows they don’t and can’t work, even Michael Moore ( watch Planet of the Humans). But that is not to the point. Dues must be paid. Sacrifices made.
However, the absence of religion leaves a yawning chasm. Paying for the sin of global warming can’t fill it all. In such circumstances, COVID-19 is a godsend (so to speak) for idolaters. Kow-towing to authoritarian leaders, viewing pointless social-distance measures as sacrifices for the common good. Imprisoning the impure in apartment buildings. It all has a pseudo-religious feel to it. Look at the English moronically clapping into the skies; thankful for nurses and doctors tending the sick. Hmm? Kind of thought that was their job.
And like the old pagan gods, this COVID-19 is very capricious and demanding. Spiking here, spiking there, spiking almost everywhere, even among those in nursing care. Each flurry of spikes calls forth the need for sacrificial lockdowns (including, take particular note, of churches and hymn singing).
What a nice mess it’s got us into. Destined to travel a stop-start road into a diminished future. Though as befitting any quasi-religious movement, its high priests like Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian and their minions (or is it masters) in public health are lauded and praised for their wisdom. Mind you, they must thank their lucky stars for Premier Daniel Andrews.
Andrews is the fall guy who makes everyone else look wiser. Now, far be it from me to say anything positive about the unrepentant leftie down south but exactly how is he so different from any other political leader? Most are incompetent; all are captives of blinkered public health officials. All keep lockdowns in their back pocket ever ready to appease COVID-19.
If you think it is a long bow to associate combatting global warming and a virus with faux religiosity, imagine a more rational world. God is in his Heaven and common-sense predominates on Earth. Global warming is put into a more measured perspective and, as applicable, the combined use of cleaner coal, gas and nuclear power is identified as an effective solution. And COVID-19?
I can do no better than cite part of a comment by J R Ewing on the Manhattan Contrarian site (6 July):
I understand that this virus is new … But the question I cannot figure out is this: Have these people never heard of an illness before? Sickness is a part of life. Until the mid-20th century, there was LOTS of nasty stuff out there that you could catch and there weren’t any vaccines or antibiotics: Polio, Tuberculosis, Measles, Smallpox, Chicken Pox, Whooping Cough, Scarlet Fever … Why is the situation now different? You mean we have illnesses that modern technology can’t prevent? So, we should all just give up and hide under the bed? It’s not the “panic porn” that bothers me, it’s the implicit lack of perspective. No one has any appreciation of risk or history or death. Our modern lives are so antiseptic and so irreligious that we cannot deal with a minor threat like this one without thinking it’s the end of civilization, worthy of extraordinary actions.
Now the virus is real and, stretching a point, global warming might possibly be real. Racism in Western societies isn’t real. There is no systematic racism directed against black or brown people. There used to be. There isn’t now. Never mind, combatting made-up racism (unconscious or subliminal racism for example) allows yet more scope for the irreligious to gain a pseudo-religious experience by practising ethereal genuflection.
I watched a replay of an evening English football match the other day. Players and referees knelt for exactly five seconds before the match began (the liturgical standard apparently). Listen to the commentator:
Night on night, week on week, month on month, however long it lasts, the message that black lives matter, never will become less relevant.
Let me add, “Amen” to that.
What next, white policemen washing the feet of black religious leaders? Well, that’s just me being silly. Of course, it would underscore my argument that we are in the midst of a revival of idolatry, but it would never happen. Surely?
Nice One Peter. The English were clapping the praises of that most sacred of institutions, the socialist NHS were they not? It was the most Orwellian moment, among many, of this entire unnecessary tragedy.
We are descending rapidly into enlightened paganism now – I think Christians must accept that the snowball is out of control and our fate awaits us.
The West is becoming ever more like the Egyptians, worshipping Pharoah as the locus between the unity of the heavens and the creative discord of particulate natural chaos. But without any of the Egyptian’s self-awareness.
Peter, “white” Australians have been washing the feet of black people (Aborigines) for years. Various Australian governments have over time granted Aborigines specific rights to about 47 per cent of the Australian mainland, including Tasmania (lest you think I may have forgotten it). If all additional Aboriginal land claims now in process are agreed, then Aborigines will have rights over more than 74 per cent of Australia.
On top of this, Aborigines now want Andrew Forrest’s Jubilee Downs property (The Australian, July 13, 2020), stating that the land is theirs by traditional ownership and asking governments and their agencies to step in to make this happen. No regard to commercial or other law. Forget that Aborigines owe “white” settlement of Australia for their development from a traditional hunter gatherer existence to that of having the vast opportunities and goods available to all other Australians today. Embellish and argue as sacrosanct the mythical dreamtime stories, and distort history by deflecting the truth that early Aborigines saw “white” landholders as easy sources of food and tobacco. Forget that traditional Aborigines owned outright only their weapons, with everything else being shared according to ritual.
Then there are the demands of Constitutional recognition, a Voice to Parliament, a Treaty and Sovereignty.
There is more. You may find interesting my paper on the subject, at https://www.scribd.com/document/458064355/.
Best rush out to buy more soap before COVID 19 causes a shortage. There is not much time left.
lhackett, it reminds me of the often quoted Monty Python scene –
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
But but lhackett01 they weren’t hunter gatherers. That’s a “British colonial construct” to justify colonisation (of course this wasn’t done elsewhere – but post modernism puts this sort of “racist, imperialist thinking” in its correct perspective). The “renowned aboriginal historian” Bruce Pascoe has told us the truth. Aboriginals were farmers living in stone towns. They built a civilisation 65,000 years ago; invented bread, baking, and set up a continent wide democratic government! They even apparently had diplomatic recognition with Ming China! And this is beyond dispute because, as we all know, you can NEVER dispute anything a self proclaimed aboriginal says about anything (like their grandfather being shot by Cook 250 years ago) because racism, “insensitivity” and “colonialism” and all that! I mean, for aboriginal people an annual burn off is farming. A campsite they spend a few weeks of a year in is a “city”! I mean it’s Eurocentric to say these things must mean what they mean in Europe (even though they clearly apply throughout China, India and SE Asia, and vast swaths of Africa and the Americas and this sort of lifestyle originated in the Middle East)! Welcome to the crazed, leftie world of faux knowledge! They really want a Year Zero. And hasn’t that worked out well all the times it’s been done!
PT, I apologise abjectly while ‘taking a knee’. Unfortunately, the momentum of Aboriginal activism is large. It is supported by deconstructionists and postmodernists, and too many Australians follow because they hear mostly only one side of the discussion. Sorry, there is no discussion, only brainwashing, including of our children. I sent a copy of my paper to the Greens Party. They replied that they are committed to campaigning strongly for Aboriginal treaties and sovereignty. Where, oh, where are those who will act to counter this new religion – or is it idolatry?
lhackett01. Look in the mirror. It is the only place you will find someone prepared to act.
Good piece Peter. Natural global warming is as real as natural global cooling, and as for the numerous heat islands reflecting from our modern landscape, they’re so miniscule in the big picture as to be irrelevant….heat still rises and the infra red easily gets to outer space. A similar analogy can be applied to the Wuhan virus in my view. It’s in the same category as the various strains of influenza but the ‘beat up’ is a new one. The world wide frantic reporting, from 215 countries, has never been published, or probably even applied to the various strains of influenza…I think in 1918-19 there was a revolution and civil war going on in Russia and probably more of the same in China and the Middle East and half the other countries reporting now were hardly known by anyone so the statistics cannot be compared, and even now up to June we’ve still had 20739 cases of ‘old fashioned’ flu, with 36 reported deaths, and it would be hard to put those figures into real context, because there’s been a million or two vaccinations carried out, which would vastly reduce the severity, in nursing homes in particular. Vaccinations I should add that have been around since the late 30’s but really only got going well after the war. How to get some sanity back into our political system…well we could start by changing to a first past the post voting system for one thing, that’d pull a lot of the teeth of the greens I think, and then make voting non-compulsory to pretty well finish them off. Their radicalism is the big problem and the major parties pandering to it, and also the major parties would have to start working harder to get genuine votes, rather than obscure preferences.
Peter Marriott I’ve been on the waiting list for my annual flu shot for weeks now. Presumably the flu that is actually dangerous to most people is no longer considered a matter of priority. But I’m glad that there have been a couple of million who have actually received the vaccine, particularly the elderly.
Peter, I too favour non-compulsory first-past-the-post voting. It threw up Trump which is something, the likes of which, is unlikely to happen here with our voting system. On the hand, Obama, Biden, The Squad, Sanders, Democrat State governors, Green New Deal devotees, Mitt Romney and other assorted radicals and creeps all emerged from FPTP.
The realisation that Nature controls us – and not vice versa – is generally sufficient to drive most people, including prime ministers, into the embrace of a god or goddess, or folk in white coats, some of whom pretend to be “climate scientists”.
Why, if it could happen to this chap, it could happen to anyone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3cZJ3iURzk
“Will you tell these fools I’m not crazy? Make them listen to me before it’s too late!”
As for BLM, there are now more and more people seeking retribution for colonial sins. Hope they don’t get their hands on a copy of Richard Ligon’s (1590-1662) True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados.
and rediscover how “England got its sweet tooth” from the blood, sweat and tears of slaves, A day that changed the world: 23 August, 1833, Parliament passed the Emancipation Act a month after the death of Wilberforce.
Imagine what it will be like when Africa is 40+% of the world’s population. Between 2020 and 2050, half of the world’s growth will occur in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the United States, Indonesia and Uganda. Nigeria will overtake the US to become the world’s third largest country in just 35 years with 400 million people; more than double its current 170 million and eight times what it was a century ago.
Developing countries already control the UN. Once bogus “climate reparations” are paid there will be even less money in the kitty for ‘slave reparations”, especially after Covid-19. No problem. Just keeping “printing helicopter money”. And so on and so forth.
Native title over so much of the Australian land form is something that future generations will have to deal with. They will see it as one of the mistakes of the past. The Mabo case was about a settled territory, held by horticulturalists. The push to claim that aborigines were horticulturalists too will doubtless act as an attempt to make the Mabo case fit the Native Title myth. That said, aboriginal people have suffered, as any tribal people does when a new technology and its social hierarchies are introduced. That is a fact of history, for all tribal peoples, including those we all came from. Modern Australia has been generous in funding although policies have often been the wrong ones, creating dependence and a victim mentality.
On Covid-19 – a very useful reference for some maths re herd immunity is at:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/07/07/second-wave-not-even-close/
RB, I think I have run my race as an activist, useless at the moment anyway as I have recently broken my foot on a health walk (!) and it is in a very ugly and cumbersome black surgical boot, but I do think that sharing information in various places online is one way of building up momentum for change. We can all do our bit, in other words, albeit limited. Some do much more of the heavy lifting than others though. All power to them.
One good thing about ‘the boot’ is that I looked so pathetic at the entrance to Services Australia with a huge Covid-avoiding line up in the cold street with no seating that they took me straight in. 🙂