It is a curious quirk of human intellectual history that what first look like new and innovative ideas are oftentimes merely the resurrections of long discredited dogma. When novelist Dan Brown first published his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, for example he was feted by Church-bashing secularist elites as a modern-day prophet; an agnostic David heroically felling the Goliath Church with the sling of his keyboard and the stone of his wit. In truth Brown’s attack on the historical Jesus and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church He founded were mere fictional retellings of the Arian and Nestorian heresies of old. Truly, as David’s son Solomon wrote, “…there is nothing new under the sun.” And this reference brings us round to the focus of this essay: the New Pagans, the intellectual and theological descendants of their forebears, the idolatrous worshipers of Earth, sea, and Sun.

Like their predecessors, these pagans worship not the Creator, but rather a pantheon of gods comprised of the created universe itself. Their enemies are not the Powers and Principalities about whom the Apostle Paul warns us, but rather mankind itself, those very beings – created in the image and likeness of God – for whom the material universe was called into being by the Word of God in the first place. For them Original Sin is not Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden, but rather human flourishing brought about by industry and technological progress. They believe not in the goodness of God’s original command to mankind “to be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Their holy writ is not the Inspired Scriptures of the Christian Canon, but the writings of would-be tyrants such as Karl Marx, materialists such as Charles Darwin, environmentalists such as Rachel Carson, eugenicist’s such as Margaret Sanger, and whose principal prophet was Thomas Malthus – the British economist whose ideas on the negative impact of human population growth on the natural environment have been twisted into a rationale for the genocide of forced abortions and sterilizations by the likes of anti-humanists such as Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren. Lastly, their liturgy is scientism, that insidious variant of political philosophy which uses a seeming veneer of science to at once disguise and legitimize its underlying fascism, because as the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said of the Soviet Union “The only great influence from the outside world the Soviets allow in is science; that’s because they can turn science back against the world.” This politicized pseudo-science is used by the New Pagans as a weapon to control and dominate others while enriching themselves.

Like all pagan cults, there is a priesthood of sorts which benefits from the rules it imposes on others while hypocritically ignoring those same dictates. For example, the pontifex maximus of the New Pagans, former American Vice President Al Gore has made a fortune measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars since leaving office by spreading and capitalizing on the myth of man-made global warming, urging others to reduce their “carbon footprint” while owning several massive, energy-guzzling mansions and flying all over the world on private jets in his attempt to force-feed his snake oil on the rest of us. He is supported on this crusade by fellow elites in the business community who’ve made even larger fortunes selling expensive and unwanted energy alternatives such as windmills and solar panels.

The magisterium of the New Pagans is the United Nation’s IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Through the IPCC and parallel efforts by its individual member states, the UN pushes this same myth through its studies and mandates in order to destroy global capitalism. As Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change said with respect to the UN’s climate change regulations, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.” The global warming hypothesis is not now, nor was it ever about the environment; it’s about economics and politics.

In an ironic twist, however, the laity of this church of the New Pagans, the well-meaning, tree-hugging, nature worshiping devotees of the global warming myth misses the forest for the trees; in their zeal to save Mother Earth they accept on faith both the misdiagnosis of her problem and the wrong-headed prescription proposed to cure it – a reduction in carbon emissions to reduce global temperatures – a cure very much worse than the imaginary disease.

Their priesthood warns of a man-made environmental catastrophe resulting from industry’s emission of carbon dioxide, which the New Pagans have labeled a pollutant and green house gas, accusing it of causing the scourge of global warming. However, the food-chain on which all life on Earth depends requires the process of photosynthesis whereby carbon dioxide is consumed by plants by the light of the sun and as a byproduct produces the oxygen necessary to sustain all life.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is a necessary and naturally occurring chemical compound without which life on Earth would be impossible. And the loss of industry and economic growth which would result from the reduction of “greenhouse gasses” would be devastating to all but the richest people on Earth – who not coincidentally happen to be the same self-serving elites pushing the global warming myth in the first place.

Let us assume for a moment the Earth really is warming due to the atmospheric carbon dioxide driven greenhouse effect the New Pagans describe. Would a theoretically warming planet be a catastrophe or a blessing? The truth of the matter is that a warming planet would be a great benefit to the Earth and all her biological inhabitants.

Throughout the history of civilization the greatest periods of human flourishing have coincided with what have been identified as warm periods in the geological record (the Renaissance, for example;) conversely the darkest and deadliest eras in history have occurred during periods of lower global temperatures (times of famine and plague.) This is because warmer climates are better suited for cultivated agriculture and natural plant growth – a fact to which anyone who has compared the topography of the Earths equator to its poles can attest. The worst-case scenario of global warming is that in the long-run coastal communities may have to move further inland or construct dikes to keep the sea at bay – a reasonable proposition considering modern engineering technologies. Conversely, a worst-case scenario involving falling global temperatures would include starvation and disease on a cataclysmic scale.

But is the Earth really burning up with fever? The simple fact is that the average temperature today is less than it was two decades ago despite all the predictions to the contrary made by the hand-wringing New Pagans. And the Antarctic ice caps have more ice by volume than ever before. So, unfortunately no, the Earth is not warming at all.

What impact does man have on the climate in any event? Very little; the Earth’s climate is determined largely the sun – its proximity and angle relative to the Earth (the driving force behind the changing seasons), and the intensity of the activity of the sun are what determine the climate on this planet as well as every other body in the solar system. In periods or cycles of increasing solar activity the planet warms; as solar activity decreases, the planet cools. This is a perfectly natural occurrence and has been happening throughout geological history.

We are often told that there is a near universal scientific consensus in support of the reality of man-caused or anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The fact remains there are thousands of brave credentialed scientists who have very publicly announced their opposition to this absurd hypothesis at great risk to their own reputations and prospects for future employment. One of these is Dr. Patrick Moore, founder of the environmental activist group Greenpeace. But, why is it so risky to oppose the AGW hypothesis publicly? Because most researchers working in fields related to the environmental sciences are affiliated in some way with the universities which are deeply dependent upon research grants from the same self-serving governments and NGO’s pushing the climate change scare in the first place. These grants are conditional and given only to those groups whose findings confirm or support the AGW hypothesis. Skeptics need not apply.

And what of those scientists who’ve sold their integrity to the highest grant-endowing bidder? How do they manage to predict the earth’s climate years and even centuries into the future? Even Nostradamus was never such a bold teller of misfortune. How are these Chicken Little, scare-mongering predictions of run-away, man-caused global warming resulting in melting ice caps and biblical deluges inundating helpless coastal communities and drowning hapless polar bears made, anyway? By creating computer programs and algorithms (no pun intended, Al Gore) that are very easily manipulated to produce the already predetermined outcome and which in no way conform to the true scientific method. That’s right, they write the program and choose the data to input and, voila! The sky is falling! They then seek to use these dire predictions of impending doom to legislate us all into poverty while they grow fat and rich.

The New Pagans have created a cult that preaches a gospel not of eternal salvation, but of temporal conservation; theirs is not an Apocalypse of hope as is the last book in the New Testament; rather it is a mythical dystopian future they cynically use to dominate, impoverish, and enslave. They seek to enforce compulsive misery on the people to atone for their supposed environmental sins, rather than preach the Gospel of voluntary and redemptive suffering a Christian trustingly endures and joins to the most Holy Cross of our Savior.

When the Almighty gave man dominion over the earth, He also gave us the responsibility to be faithful stewards of creation. But caring for the environment must not come at the cost of human misery, nor should it benefit a small cadre of elitists who cynically utilize our commendable concern for the welfare of our planet to dominate and impoverish us.

Before Christianity was brought to the Western Hemisphere by the Spaniards, the pagan Aztecs made blood sacrifices of innocent human beings to appease their angry and capricious  gods.  Untold thousands were slaughtered.   The One True God put a stop to this barbarity through the agent of the Conquistadors.  The New Pagans are more subtle, but no less deadly.  They would have us stretch out not on a literal altar of death, but on one of poverty and subjection.  The time has come to declare our independence from the cult of the New Pagans.