It's interesting to observe the nominally-religious American talking heads refer to liberal causes such as Global Warming as being treated, by the liberals, as religion. For example, Al Gore, the American Bishop of the Church of Global Warming declares from the pulpit his gospel of environmentalism:
"After more than thirty years as a student of the climate crisis, I have a lot to share. I have tried to tell this story in a way that will interest all kinds of readers. My hope is that those who read the book and see the film will begin to feel, as I have for a long time, that global warming is not just about science and that it is not just a political issue. It is really a moral issue." -- Al Gore
From "Penance Won't Pay for the Sins of Liberals" by Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University: Tribune Media Services, posted May 18, 2007
What do leftist, mostly secular elites share with medieval sinners?
They feel bad that the way they live sometimes doesn't quite match their professed dogma.
Many in the medieval church were criticized by internal reformers and the public at large for their controversial granting of penance, especially to the wealthy and influential. Clergy increasingly offered absolution of sins by ordering the guilty to confess. Better yet, sometimes the well-heeled sinners were told to pay money to the church, or to do good works that could then be banked to offset their bad.
Of course, critics of the practice argued that serial confessions simply encouraged serial sinning. The calculating sinner would do good things in one place to offset his premeditated bad in another. The corruption surrounding these cynical penances and indulgences helped anger Martin Luther and cause the Reformation.
. . .
Take the idea of "carbon offsets" made popular by Al Gore. If well-meaning environmentalist activists and celebrities either cannot or will not give up their private jets or huge energy-hungry houses, they can still find a way to excuse their illiberal consumption.
Instead of the local parish priest, green companies exist to take confession and tabulate environmental sins. Then they offer the offenders a way out of feeling bad while continuing their conspicuous consumption.
You can give money to an exchange service that does environmental good in equal measure to your bad. Or, in do-it-yourself fashion, you can calibrate how much energy you hog, and then do penance by planting trees or setting up a wind generator.
Either way, your own high life stays uninterrupted.
Some prominent green activists pay their environmental penance in cash, barter or symbolism to keep the good life. Al Gore, for example, still gets to use 20 times more electricity in his Tennessee mansion than the average household.
Take also the case of Laurie David, the green activist and wife of "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David. She has recently generated plenty of publicity for her biofuel-powered bus tour to promote environmentalism. But in other circumstances, David still flies on gas-guzzling private jets.
. . .
These varieties of contemporary offsets could be expanded. But you get the picture of the moral ambiguity. Penance, ancient and modern, was thought corrupt because it was not sincere apology nor genuine in its promise to stop the sin.
Thanks to carbon offsets, Al Gore keeps his mansion and still feels good while warning others we all can't live as he does.
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