A long time ago, somebody figured out that people were afraid of nature. With this realization, our subject set out to carve a statue of a woman with a horned head dress, and declared the idol to be Ninhursag, the goddess of the earth. Our carver then set about convincing people that if they brought their best wheat, their best grapes, and their best lambs and calves to sacrifice to the goddess then they will be blessed with plenty and the grace of the divine goddess will rain down upon them, but if they refused they would be cursed with pestilence.
And thus the people, rending their garments and lamenting of their fear of the weather and their invented devil gods, brought their best produce to their idols, making themselves poorer and their lives more difficult all out of superstition and fear of their world.
It grew into dogma – everybody knew that sacrifices to the idols was a necessary step to ensure survival of the community and the individual alike.
Of course, modern humanity has advanced light-years beyond these petty superstitions. We don’t fear natural phenomena; we fear a chemical element – carbon.
Enter the global climate change movement, who has informed us that driving cars, using electricity and having children (or as Prince Philip called them, Carbon Bombs,) are all causing massive expulsions of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, and that if it continued, the seas would rise, hurricanes and other storms would run rampant, crops would wilt and famine would choke all the lands everywhere.
It has turned into a dogma – everybody knows that carbon dioxide from human activity will destroy all the world with global warming and floods, droughts, heat, cold, etc…
Therefore we the peasants must be constrained in our “carbon footprints,†with higher taxes on gasoline, electricity, natural gas, food, clothing, babies and every other trapping of ordinary life.
So, instead of sacrificing your standard of living to a god, you can sacrifice your standard of living to government.
Of course, if you feel uniquely guilty about your existence, you can sacrifice a larger portion of your income through the purchase of carbon offsets; plenary indulgences guaranteeing your place in green heaven regardless of what you do in your everyday life, and the carvers of the environmentalist gods are standing ready to accept your offering.
They also have no more power over the climate as the carved idols of primitive cultures, but they will take your hard-earned wealth if they can convince you that your sacrifices are for the greater good by means of gratifying the new climate goddess.
The environmentalist cult has even threatened “climate change deniers,†going so far as calling for systematic punishment of those who publicly disagree with the climate change agenda. One Australian commentator even called for forcible tattooing of climate change skeptics. Our self-appointed betters aren’t above sending heretics to the dungeons as it turns out.
Under the climate change regime, progress is renamed destruction, poverty assumes the name “sustainable development,†and naturally there are huge profits to be made by the prophets of the new nature worship; and a horde of people line up to sacrifice wealth and liberty out of fear and without receiving anything in return.
So, go surrender your freedom, your mobility, your red meat and your air conditioning to the new Ninhursag if you wish. I’ll burn a pile of tires in honor of Kali the Destroyer, and we’ll see what happens.