Extinction Rebellion – the new religion with Greta as its saint
by Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack, The Conservative Woman:
ADMIT it, the apocalyptic has always featured in church life. Both Old and New Testaments contain revelations of the dire consequences which are about to happen unless we fallen humans get our act together and begin to follow God’s teachings.
The history of the church is full of individuals and movements who imagined that they were prophets of God and whipped people up into a frenzy of fear about what they were utterly convinced would happen. The fact that their prophecies don’t transpire, and that dates for the final apocalypse have to be constantly readjusted, deters them not a whit.
Today, having abandoned the Christian faith, we have secular prophets of apocalypse just as frenzied as Christian millenarians, and just as full of faith that they are amongst the righteous and that those who don’t listen to them are sinners of the darkest hue. Extinction Rebellion is a quasi-religious secular sect which guarantees us that the end really is nigh this time, honest.
To emphasise their point they are blockading parts of London for a fortnight, dancing in the streets, glueing themselves to pavements and lying spreadeagled on top of aircraft. People are prevented from getting to work, the sick find their way to hospital blocked and the capital of the fifth-largest economy on earth is clogged with mime dancers and tent-dwelling bongo drummers.
The problem is that there is no scientific basis for their assertions*. Even the most extreme, worst-case scenarios painted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) go nowhere near the claims of Extinction Rebellion.
Editor’s note: * The editor of AM wants to make it clear that it is not the policy of AM to deny the existence of climate change. While not being a scientist, the editor is aware that while the consensus agrees that CO2 emissions are probably a major cause of climate change, there is room for debate on the extent to which this is the case (and whether it can be reversed), and therefore the more extreme claims of Extinction Rebellion and the philosophical underpinning of this movement should be open to challenge from a scientific and an orthodox Christian perspective.
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