Quote:
Originally Posted by Burninator
You mean his all encompassing definition of religion by including global warming/climate change under that umbrella? Whether you agree or not about that issue, calling one side a religion is stretching the word religion so far as to make the word useless. I fond it neither intelligent nor well thought out.
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He only confirmed what I had thought and had experienced all along, long before I ever read that article written by him. Years before I ever read that article (thanks for bringing it to my attention CP) I has experienced many situations where I merely mentioned to people I had met that I was not totally convinced by the global warming argument, that it was a largely man-made phenomenon that we could have any efficacy in reversing...and the indignance that was returned to me just made my brain think that this was exactly like talking to someone who was zealously religious. Religions don't have to be theological. I really believe it's just part of the human psyche. These people just got really irrationally argumentative and started going over certain talking points again and again and then finally just getting really mad at me. I'm a pretty timid and non-argumentative guy in person, I just mentioned that I didn't totally believe it and I had people that I knew yelling at me. I watched a lot of films on climate change, read books, articles, and news stories and everything about certain aspects of it really annoy me. For many people, the whole climate change thing was very much like a secular religion in how zealously attached they were to certain ideas, even to the point of cognitive dissonance.
I care about the issue, I just don't like the way people got blindly hysterical about it (including people I knew personally). The whole movement gives me a bad taste in how politicized it became. It became in many ways (in my view), a politics of fear...and dissenting voices get drowned out, denied government funding, or silenced by peer pressure.
So in the end, maybe I just enjoyed the article so much because one of my favorite authors and a very respected and intelligent guy came to the same conclusion that I did and I wasn't just crazy.
