Just before Christmas, I was looking for a good book to read. Without a new historical book on my dresser to delve into and unwilling to wait for one from Amazon, I turned my attention to the Warden library of previously enjoyed books.
“The Road Less Traveled” by M. Scott Peck caught my eye. Written 46 years ago in 1978, it was a national best-seller for four years. Many of you probably remember it. Some may have read it. I purchased and read it in the mid-80s for a class on spirituality.
A Harvard-educated psychiatrist— when a Harvard education meant something — Peck wrote several books on spiritual development, with The Road Less Traveled being his first. I have all but one.
The third section of Peck’s first book, entitled Growth and Religion, struck me as it contains an interesting theme I have found in other sources this past year — everyone has a religion, and we all worship something, whether it’s the one true God or a form of idolatry.
“We suffer,” Peck says, “from a tendency to define religion too narrowly. We tend to think that religion must include a belief in God or some ritualistic practice or membership in a worshiping group. We are likely to say of someone who does not attend church or believe in a superior being, ‘He or she is not religious.’” Peck goes on to say, “The fact of the matter is that everyone has an explicit or implicit set of ideas and beliefs as to the essential nature of the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron, whom I referenced in this column two weeks ago, puts it this way, “Everyone, even the most un-churched, operates under the aegis of something he or she considers supreme, a summum bonum or highest good. No one would get out of bed in the morning unless he believed in some value that is ultimately motivating his actions and decisions. This might be bodily pleasure or fame or material goods, or it might be one’s country or family, but if it is functioning as the prime mover of a person’s activity, it is playing the role of a god and it is being, in effect worshiped.”
The biggest organized religion that most people are not aware of is those who promote the environment and climate change.
We all need something bigger than ourselves to believe in. As the enlightened, highly educated of our society turned away from God, they switched their religion to the environment. It has also become the religion of the U.S. Federal Government as President Joe Biden forces the country toward electric vehicles.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said in the 1800s that as belief in God waned, people would create new religions.
Just over 20 years ago best selling author Michael Crichton — author of “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” — gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Fransisco where he pointed out that modern environmentalism is the “religion of choice for urban atheists.”
Let’s take a look at Crichton’s arguments for his theory. In his speech, Crichton points out that “environmentalism is, in fact, a perfect 21st-century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.”
The environmental movement has an Eden, before man, a fall from grace when we polluted the earth and a judgment day coming for all of us unless we change our evil ways.
He says, “We are all energy sinners, doomed to die unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe.”
The church of environmentalism uses fear to control its members. On Sept. 1, 2022, Biden — a bishop in the church of environmentalism — said climate change “is literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger…it is ‘code red’ for humanity.”
Fear is a strong emotion that the environmental movement uses to control us. This has gone so far as to give children — and adults — nightmares. Many young adults are foregoing having children because they believe we are destroying the earth and that humans will become extinct in as little as 20 years.
You cannot debate the facts of climate change with a true believer because it is part of their faith.
What do you worship, the one true God, the environment, or something else?
Peck’s books are still worth reading. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2005 with Parkinson’s disease and pancreatic and liver duct cancer.
