Richard Drake

"...just don't imagine I was saying anything like what you thought I was!"

Which is why I asked for clarification from you, so I'd know for certain what you meant, not what I thought you'd meant.

I feel one of the great myths of proponents of science like to raise is the Galileo affair (used it myself until I saw this: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0005.html). Yeah, I know that it is a report made by the Catholics themselves, but it does ring so true – Galileo being a cantankerous old git, who liked to upset his friends. Note: a lot of the Catholic hierarchy were friends with GG; it is just that even they got fed up with how far he was pushing them.

As one of the elders said at the time: “Prove it!” Well, of course, he couldn’t; it is bizarre that we do insist that anything claimed now comes complete with proof, yet insist in the rightness of Galileo, even though he had NO proof!

…

Now I’ve lost my thread, and not too sure where I was going with the argument… Must be something to do with your bringing up the Pier Head, Geronimo; I have many happy memories of crossing the Mersey, and the charge up off the pontoons. On my last visit, the ferry is now a tourist cruise, and after landing, folks just ambled up. Totally took the wind from my sails, that; then to see what they were doing to the Pier Head! Made me depressed for much of the rest of that day.

Have to dash a bit, as the time will soon be up on this server, and I will be off-line for a couple of weeks – however, another point is that I doubt a million tons of explosives would have been needed; while no expert, perhaps a few hundred pounds. Whatever your idea about that fateful day, there were certainly a lot unusual about it, apart from the obvious.

As for Orange v Greens, when I ended up in hospital after a car-crash, I caused a lot of consternation when asked my religion: “Christian,” I replied. “Yes, but what kind?” they asked. My reply: “If there is but one God and one Christ, how can there be more than one kind of Christian?” seemed to shut them up.

Getting back to the CAGW cult theme, there is little doubt that it is a cult, though I suspect that it will go the way of so many others when it really has so little on which to base itself. There will, of course, always be those who cling to it as limpets to a rock – or perhaps a better analogy would be to a piece of wood, drifting aimlessly over the open ocean, with no shore in sight, and no foundations for the future.

Andy W, I’ve read some more of your writings and I don’t disagree with your views of AGW having many of the hallmarks of a religion but…

I recently watched a series about Medieval England and how people lived in service to the monks. It was almost as alien a life to ours as it’s possible to get. Only in the most remote parts of the modern world are there people with whom we have less in common. Religion was powerful for a great many reasons that no longer apply. That is not to say they couldn’t come back into power but society would be in a serious mess if it did.

One of the biggest changes is freedom. I don’t mean a lack of rules and punishment, though that is part of it, but the freedom to do and think almost anything we can imagine. Even the most boring lives are filled with varied activities and information beyond the dreams of 100 years ago or beyond. We are allowed and even encouraged to be different. We’re not even obligated to form allegiances any more. We can chose a football team for a town that is not our own or even not chose football at all. Men have the right to prefer ballet over rugby and women can do science instead of needlework. We can think and even declare that we despise our employer, our king or even our parents. All those pressure to fit in are breaking down. Sure, it’s leading to a lot of stress but it makes us into very different people than our ancestors. I would not be surprised if our brains were physically different because our experiences are so dissimilar.

While there are still powerful and repeated memes in our society, they are muted because there are so many other messages bombarding us each day. Who can hear the trumpets of doom or the call to prayer over all the other noises? In the past a bible thumping street preacher might have attracted an awed audience, now we avoid eye contact, rush passed and mutter ‘nuttter’. Even the BBC has a limited grasp on our time. It may seem to us that AGW is hammered into our consciousness at every opportunity but I’d bet if we added every second it wouldn’t amount to that much. It certainly wouldn’t equal a priest preaching fire and brimstone each week and our neighbours passing judgement all the time on whether we were pious enough. When we sort our rubbish into bins, we’re not thinking of CO2, we’re wondering about waste disposal or council tax or ‘those sausages were very good, I must get some more’.

AGW may look very like a religion but we no longer look like a good congregation. We are more like a nation of princes than peasants and the aristocracy have rarely been good at piety. By all means look to the past but the best evidence is from the last ten years not the last thousand.

geronimo, the game you've just invented was called Call My Bluff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_My_Bluff

Mar 31, 2014 at 9:15 PM | TinyCO2

Hi Tiny CO2. I nowhere implied that CAGW would be all-powerful, or not have competition from many interests and other allegiances too, or that the expression of various belief-systems is identical, despite shared mechanisms that drive a range of similar behaviours. Even zealous modern eco-warriors, or from another not-long-ago secular system, soviet commisars, are not as blatant as, say, the Jesuits in their hey-day. But that doesn't mean CAGW is toothless or isn't having a big impact upon the world, an impact that is primarily social and not particularly related to climate, which was just a trigger mechanism.

Look at how much influence CAGW has gained in just thirty years or so, many times faster than the mainstream trad religions.One of the reasons why modern secular belief systems may be getting so much leverage is *because* the older religions and their 'hold' are losing ground. The mechanisms for belief and the support of self-sustaining narratives are with us from a long evolutionary past, there's a lot of inertia there and likely this will remain a mainstream driver for a very long time yet. Via iterative selection of narrative algorithms, belief systems have continuously increased their sophistication and subtlety over the ages, as religious innovation shows, and secular variants like CAGW may just be the latest in a long line of those innovations. As for bible thumping, I think even Christianity left that method behind as a mainstream approach around a century back, and it features a whole range of (generally more positive) and subtle encouragement methods these days.

The interesting thing about successful belief systems is also that many folks honestly, willingly and passionately put their free-time into such things, as literally hundreds of thousands of green volunteers around the world do today for the cause of CAGW, and in previous systems both religious and secular (e.g. exteme politics), many generations have done in the past. 'Free' time is therefore an advantage and driver of such a system, even if those firmly outside the system would not regard that time as 'free' anymore, but in service to an unpalatable regime.

Ultimately what matters is how much damage is there going to be. The likely reason that belief systems are so entrenched are that they are an evolutionary advantage, a strong body of thought is speculating that civilisation would never have arisen without religion, for instance. (The memetic way of saying this is that we co-evolved with cultural entities like religion). If there is still big net benefit, we wouldn't neccessarily want to grow out of belief altogether, but we do want to grow out of cultural parasites living off the belief-system mechanics, which CAGW may be. Think of all the many trillions spent, which may turn out to be wholly wasted. What benefical projects could this almost unimaginable amout have been turned to instead? Think of the raised fuel costs, the immense environmental damage and raised food prices from the huge bio-fuel debacle, all of this and more perhaps costing lives in excess cold-deaths and increased starvation. All this because of a belief-system that got out of control; all this in defiance of reason.

Remember pretty much all princes there have ever been were once religious, often more devout than the commoners (though for some even in the throes of decadence, plus their belief often sharply increased as they neared death); belief systems have no bias to whom they suck in, and there is immense support for CAGW from the great and the rich of today who you'd think would have more thought, leisure and resources to resist. So comparing us to princes is perhaps not helping your point, but I agree that a kind of practical skepticism often arises from the ordinary man and woman who is forced grumpily through the rituals despite seeing little point.

In the end I think a probably fatal weakness of the CAGW belief system is that it hitched its wagon to temperature, but I'm already surprised by how little damage 13 - 17 years of non-rise in GST has inflicted upon CAGW. The governments of most countries are still with the program. And belief-systems are buggers for evolving into different forms that wriggle out of extinction. I'd be more than happy to be proved wrong, but I think there's a lot more than 3 or 4 years left in this narrative entity, as I think you mentioned up-thread, and potentially an awful lot more damage and waste still to come.

Mar 31, 2014 at 9:15 PM | TinyCO2
"Even the BBC has a limited grasp on our time"

heh, I noticed 2nd item on the BBC national news as I drove home today, the IPCC alarmism out of WG2 meeting.

Go "away" for a few days and look what happens... interesting posts. Give me some time to catch up.

As a kid I obviously had a thing for chaotic systems*... no trip to down town was complete until me mam gave into demands to walk down to the Pier Head to watch this.

Drury Lane Bucket Fountain, Beetham Plaza Liverpool

It is relevant to the discussion, the innocence of a snotty nosed 5 year old staring up in wide-eyed wonder. More on that later. A few years I was staying for one evening in a Boutique Hotel near Albert dock. My only desire that evening was to find it again, eventually I did.

*try modelling it, I mean really modelling it to a predictive level.

Mar 31, 2014 at 9:15 PM | TinyCO2

P.S. If you have my stuff you'll see that I'm not claiming CAGW is a religion exactly. I'm claiming that both religions and secular cultural entities like CAGW are different kinds of memeplex. Hence there are some differences as well as many strong similarities. There is some compare and contrast.

Andy West "P.S. If you have my stuff you'll see that I'm not claiming CAGW is a religion exactly."

I agree, not exactly, it doesn't have the ritual worship rites associated with what I'd call a religion, not does environmentalism for that matter. However it does have the blind evidence free belief we see in religions, and it does have, at its fringes, the small group of people that appear in any religion who have a visceral hatred for those who deny the tenets of the religion.

Which brings me to another thought, or have you subliminally educated me? Maybe religions are a subset of some greater human behavioural characteristic which involves rallying round some core belief. Or is that what you've been saying all along and the penny has only just dropped with us chatterers at the back of the class?

Andy, I didn’t think you thought AGW was exactly like a cult or a religion but it’s as valuable to identify where it’s not similar and debate whether those differences makes it stronger or weaker. I could say that it looks more like bureaucracy gone viral but priests invented bureaucracy so is it just a subset of religious structure or is a religion a bureaucracy with a special retirement plan? As far as I know the main thing that sets religions and cults above the rest is the promise of an afterlife. Warmists are very keen to merge with religions so that they can say that cutting CO2 is the key to the next life. Religions have a problem with it because there’s no rule ‘Thou shalt not cause to burn that which resideth beneath the ground.’ If god could irrationally warn against pigs, menstruation and homosexuality, surely he could have dropped something in about fossil fuels?

Did princes believe in God? We’re back to the difference between knowledge and belief. If breaking the 10 commandments were not a sign of disbelief in god then yes, princes believed, but in reality what they believed in was their own version of religion. One wherein they could do much of what they pleased, secure in the feeling that god was on their side. It would have been very hard to square chopping people’s heads off, chasing maidens and annexing somebody else’s land (containing covetable asses or not), if the question ‘would god approve’ had kept cropping up. Priests and even Popes have been known to break the rules right, left and centre. The Catholics even invented the whole concept of - do as you please and then absolve your way out of trouble. The more powerful the person the more rules they could rework. That’s exactly the behaviour we see from the warmist elite today.

The concept of religions has stayed the same it’s the people that have changed. Like the princes, we can rewrite the rules. When everyone practices the faith in their own way it isn’t an all powerful religion any more, no matter how hard warmists try to make it.

Richard, you give some excellent examples of people changing the religion, not the other way round. Religion requires people to follow one path, no matter how barmy or reasonable, or it's not the same religion any more. Christianity is fracturing into ever smaller churches and by far the biggest remaining is 'The Church Of The Christmas Service' wherein people make an annual pilgrimage to sing some nice songs that used to rhyme till the progressives ruined them. No I'm lying the biggest church is the 'I've ticked the box on the census because I don't want anyone to think I'm evil but you couldn't lure me into a church with a cream cake' congregational.

You don't need to believe in god to be good and you don't have to be an atheist to be bad. Even personal opinions on what constitutes bad are driving wedges into previously solid churches. AGW is seeing the same problem. No two people seem to agree on how a good warmist should behave. Personally cutting CO2 doesn't seem to feature heavily in the green 10 commandments.

"The latest stats from the Church of England for England ain't anything like the whole story." Richard Drake.

It is if we're considering public susceptability to religious memes in THIS country.

Johanna. I can't speak for Jiminy, but this is a blog not the houses of parliament. We come on here to kick ideas around, I don't believe we'll make any profound discoveries from the various contributions, we're passing the time keeping out of the way of the combined harvesters (I'll explain that to you if you wish), so it's not that serious. On the other hand interactions with people who have a different perspective/superior knowledge are always useful and, for me at least, broaden my outlook and improve my knowledge.

As to the actual question, read my posts, I simply don't know the answer to the question posed by Jiminy, but have been intrigued by the contribution from Andy West, most of which I simply don't understand, but I can't dismiss it because there appears to be a huge volume of scholarship behind it. Of course as an atheist I realise that there is also a huge volume of scholarship behind religious belief, with which I'm not impressed. I am extremely nervous of a discipline that believes they can identify, describe and proscribe the behaviour of human beings, but hey, they're trying, we can afford it, so why not? We're just shooting the breeze here, maybe we'll learn something, who knows?.

Johanna, what can I say? Of course you're right, and I don't want to be sexist but sometimes it takes a female to recognise blathering when she sees it. Especially my own Mam.

Apr 1, 2014 at 9:06 AM | geronimo

Your first paragraph: absolutely. Your second paragraph: Yes, a charateristic from our evolution. You're not looking like you're near the back on any topics I've seen you comment on.

Apr 1, 2014 at 4:22 PM | Richard Drake
"This doesn't allow for any development, good or bad."

Indeed. Religions have developmental tractories, which to a large extent reflect the stage / sophistication of the culture that spawned them, and often they have been one of the largest elements of a culture. This doesn't mean everything is neat and tidy and fits exactly where you'd expect it to. In the constant swirl of many cultures and the spawning of fringe cults with more focused interests, plus reducing geographical isolation and the alliance of religions with tribal / national / empire interests, then one would expect more complexity. But all religions develop, also old ones die out to be replaced by those that are more suited to the current state of cultural competition. Looking beneath the surface complexity at the mechanisms that make belief systems work, is one way of figuring out the trajectories and then applying that insight to particular situations. No different to analysing anthing else really.

TinyCO2:

I agree it's very useful to examine the differences between religions and secular belief systems like CAGW, and I agree that the fact of the latter not being able to make blantant offers of salvation is one of the important differences; as I noted to you upthread this is why a range of 'salvation substitutes' is offered instead, such as the constant refrain from Hansen and others that 'your grandkids are gonna die' (so folks get to 'save them' if sufficient 'believe'). And there are many commonalities, as you also note, for instance 'orthodoxy', and the spawning of fringe hate against non-believers that you specifically cite. I also agree that many of the elite in both religions and CAGW break the rules, even while (hypocritically) still believing in many cases (which I would regard as another commonality). But the very fact that we can compare and contrast in this way is in itself an admission that we are comparing and contrasting two similar systems, and hence that there will be common driving mechanisms underneath that ought to be identifiable. I'm a great believer that one can unravel anything with reason, given enough time, and though it may take generations, a huge amount of time from a lot of clever folks has already been spent looking into this topic.