Zeitgeist: Custodians of the Garden

[andygates]

First those solar power roof tiles, now the idea that the best way to work around the disconnect between polluter and effect is to make the act of polluting a sin, my zeitgeist-fu is strong right now.  The Vatican have announced a new list of deadly sins, which are mostly modern glosses on the old naughtiness, and environmental pollution is right in there.  The more I think of it, the more I think it's sheer bloody genius.

It gets good visceral wrath-of-God afterlife fear into people who otherwise might not give a flying damn.  People are funny like that.  And those same people are going to believe that Katrina was God spanking their filthy sinful asses if they've been stenching up the place.  They're *is* a connection, but it's too disconnected and statistical for most people.

Government plans and UN initiatives last for years or decades.  The problem we're facing is epic in scale, brain-hurtingly vast, and messed up with double-signals like the UK Government's green-lighting of a new coal power station (ffs!).  The Catholic Church knows persistence.  It doesn't have water down policy to fight elections or buy support.  And it doesn't have to make the tough choices, just dispense rules and sympathy.  New coal?  "No, it is a sin.  Find another way, my child."

Because the environmental issue is, at heart, a human moral issue - and that's what these guys do. 

Comments

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

Remember I come at this as a professional.

This is what I do. Day in. Day out. I've seen what pressures work and which don't.

Frankly, believing that the church will produce a tipping effect is about as inside-the-box as you can get. Sorry, but I think it's just wishful thinking. People are inherently selfish. That's why the church is a hypocritical organisation: because it's human, and therefore selfish.

This is politics. When food prices start increasing then you will get a population level of discontent. That's when voters start to make waves. Will the Church have that effect? We live in a secular society over here. Do you think that religion will outweigh the desire for capitalist progress in the US? Has it ever?

And we're talking the Catholic church here. Just the Catholic church. The Southern Baptists have now weighed in with the suggestion that yeah, maybe we ought to do something, but it's only the Catholics who had decided that polluting the environment means you'll burn in hell.

If this were a brand new species of meme? Fine. But it ain't. It's got to fight it out with the one that goes Mankind has dominion, and that one has been around for a very long time. How many of the Christian right will get on board if they believe that Jesus is a-comin' to get them any day now and there's no point worrying about carbon footprints when God's almighty hobnail is about to smear the unbelievers into the dust while they all rise up on fluffy white clouds of Rapture?

Great fervour is produced when religions try to change. Thousands of years of dogma and tradition don't bend over and give up easily.

Religion has never been able to counter the mass desire for trade and wealth. It's written all over history. Excuse the cynicism, but I just don't see it.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

It's avowedly an inside-the-box human thing. I'm not going to claim anything else. We'll just have to see how it plays out. And yes, you may accuse me of wishful thinking if you like, I'd rather not see this go all Malthusian on our asses.

Meh.

It's fucked anyway. Maybe I just want people to feel the right amount of guilt for fucking it over.