Silly me, I thought the answer was for people who Believe to practice what they preach. Anyhow, it looks like yet another warmist, Andrew Brown, wants to position globull warming as a religion. After a long preamble we get
(Guardian) Underlying all this confusion is the problem that we don’t have a way of ranking rationalities, so that the word means something more to a moral agent than it does to an economist. There may be ways of fixing that and averting catastrophic global warming that don’t make use of religious resources, but I can’t think of any.
It’s important to this argument to understand that religious resources need not be theistic. All they need do is make manifest a higher rationality than self-interest.
There’s a reason we refer to AGW as the Church/Cult Of Gore.
What religious thought – and ritual – can supply is the two things absent from normative consumer liberalism. The first is a belief that the choice between ends is not arbitrary or wholly personal: that there are moral facts of the matter; that saving as much of humanity as possible is an obligation on all of us, and that this is actually true, and not just a matter of preference.
The second is the kind of conformism, reinforced by all kinds of social ritual, large and small, which will enforce the social discipline needed to carry societies through some pretty ghastly changes. Let’s face it, any adjustment to an ecologically sustainable standard of living is going to be a lot nastier than anything Greece is going through now. It will need considerable determination and solidarity.
Generally, those who are religious practice, or at least attempt to practice, their beliefs. Not so much with the Gaia cultists.
