Environmentalism: the Liberal religion.

Liberals wear a halo for being right on government intervention to fight poverty, to end legalized discrimination, and to stop unnecessary war. Because they're right on three issues, they can be blind to contrary wisdom found on these and other issues.

It’s difficult for conservatives to deal with liberals’ superior, dismissive tone. People who know best, our most intelligent citizens, should value truth above all else, be open to differing viewpoints, and most of all, have perspective on how little we really know about the universe of which we occupy such an infinitesimal speck. Liberals might be more humble.

Many would credit liberals for being right about the environment, about the need to protect the only planet we have. Yet environmentalism rarely generates political heat as an issue. Most people are environmentalists in that they oppose destroying the environment (pollution, clear cutting, hunting and fishing endangered species) just as they oppose killing people.

Environmentalists become controversial when they set themselves against people whose way of life depends upon a practice environmentalists oppose. If such battles demand winners and losers, with environmentalists seeking, so to speak, “coonskins to nail to the wall,” their science begins to look like religion. Environmental extremists carry the traits of religious zealots more than those of scholars. And if one is a secular liberal with no expectation of an afterlife, if one believes “God’s work must truly be our own,” then isn’t protecting mother nature for our children the highest calling we have?

To an environmental extremist, someone of privilege running a corporation destroying the earth—almost certainly a Republican—is more the enemy than any impoverished, unemployed Muslim male youth abroad using violence to further his warped religion. Environmentalists, after all, face religious zealots at home—almost certainly Republicans—who care far less about protecting an earth that is their temporary home than they do about (needlessly) fighting Islamic extremists abroad. Also, domestic environmentalists daily battle conservatives—almost certainly Republicans—who in the name of free markets fight needed laws and regulations that protect our world.

When science brought the Bible’s teachings into question during the reformation, the church used its resources to fight back.

Now environmentalists, judging by emails hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU)—a major resource center for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—are seemingly involved in a war against science similar to religion’s counter-reformation. Whether or not we are witnessing
“the greatest scientific scandal of our age,” as Christopher Booker, author of The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? calls it, the CRU-based effort tells us some environmental zealots will pervert science in pursuit of their version of “truth”.

Isn’t Michael Barone talking about a religion, not science, when he writes:

the CRU e-mailers were sincere in their belief that they were saving the planet. Like Al Gore, they wanted to convince the world's elites that the time for argument is over, the scientific consensus is clear and those who disagree can be dismissed as cranks (and should be disqualified from receiving research grants). If they had to cut a few corners, well, you have to break eggs to make an omelette.

Liberals feel they deserve to be our elite because they possess virtue and truth. They wear the halo.

So it hurts their cause when we find them suppressing truth. As Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) said, “Hypocrisy: prejudice with a halo.” Some liberals attack religion in the name of science, then practice a truth-suppressing religion of their own.