We can't have that can we?
One might reasonably compare the Green movement to the primitive Christians of the first centuries of our era.
The latter sought to save their souls by an austere faith and the former to save the planet in a similar manner.
The early Christians disdained, or affected to disdain every earthly delight. They saw the first sensation of pleasure as marking the point at which abuse began and where perfection is threatened. They resisted the gross temptations of the flesh in the service of a mightily selfish, not to say overweeningly arrogant, spiritual perfection.
If I allow Edward Gibbon to continue the tale, a writer anyone will benefit from being exposed to, the reader might replace certain words with others to his profit. Christian with Green for example.
Quote:The unfeeling candidate for heaven was instructed, not only to resist the grosser allurements of taste and smell, but even to shut his ears against the profane harmony of sounds, and to view with indifference the most finished productions of human art. Gay apparel, magnificent houses, and elegant furniture, were supposed to unite the double guilt of pride and of sensuality: a simple and mortified appearance was more suitable to the Christian who was certain of his sins and doubtful of his salvation. In their censures of luxury the fathers (Al Gore say) are extremely minute and circumstantial; and among the various articles which excite their pious indignation we may enumerate false hair, garments of any colour except white, instruments of music, vases of gold or silver, downy pilloes (as Jacob reposed his head in a stone), white bread, foreign wines, public salutations, the use of warm baths, and the practice of shaving the beard, which, according to the expression of Tertullian, is a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator. When Christianity was introduced among the rich and the polite, the observation of these singular laws was left, as it would be at present, to the few who were ambitious of superior sanctity. But it is always easy, as well as agreeable, for the inferior ranks of mankind to claim a merit from the contempt of that pomp and pleasure which fortune has placed beyond their reach. The virtue of the primitive Christians, like that of the first Romans, was very frequently guarded by poverty and ignorance.
The reader will readily see, I trust, that he has to examine his own conscience to see if he is really a Green or just another of those hypocritical twerps who scapegoat the factory, the fat cats and corporations in order to continue polluting to the maximum his income allows and that any any meagerness with regard to that income is not a proper substitute for the piety necessary to achieve the objective he affects to be pursuing.
In other words, the Greens of our world are a bunch of phoney bastards unless their carbon footprint is as light and fleeting as that of a Sudanese water carrier and they can safely be relied upon to use their supposed piety in this regard in the service of impressing it as deeply as it is in their power to do and to gear it up substantially by borrowing money and producing offspring in their own image. It is people who pollute and not factories and corporations and fat cats are too few to make much difference.
If the Greens do have a runaway success story, as the primitive Christians did, they can equally be relied upon to institute the ceremonials and trappings of opulence, affectations and dogmatic word-weavings and to impose them upon those they have risen above if not upon themselves which the intransigence of the human heart obviously precludes them from doing especially when it is taken as read that women will have equal status and representation in thier hierarchy and possibly may dominate it.
Perhaps Cyclo, if you raised the quality of your reading you may come to see that I am entirely on topic and I might even be criticised by the faint of heart of not being tangential enough.
Not only are Americans not Green- they are not Christians either.
