Religious Nonsense Combines With Environmental Hysteria

This potent negative combination is illustrated by an article in the Guardian, in praise of a recent speech by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. It's an open call to promote environmental hysteria through religious means.

For Rowan Williams the "ecocidal" moment we are experiencing reveals a profound impoverishment of our human lives. We have forgotten what it means to be human. This is a religious issue, not just an environmental one. His speech serves to express a growing tide of religious environmentalism

Try reading that without rolling your eyes or laughing. And there's more!

the "foremost casualty of environmental degradation" is the human soul

Really? Then I guess those of us who don't believe in souls don't have to worry about it.

For many new religious movements the natural world is a sacred space where humans are merely guests at the table. And many theologians urge us to rethink our picture of God – as not so much pie in the sky, but grounded in the earth, present in the world around us

Translation: we should substitute new nonsense for old nonsense.

something has gone wrong in our relationship with the earth and with one another. Although they have diverse ways of expressing it, the assumption is that material solutions cannot be the answer.

We supposedly have a "relationship" with the earth, but material solutions aren't the answer to our relationship problems. No, that doesn't sound like complete gibberish does it?

Perhaps this is why those who find it hard to believe in any God are beginning to recognise the importance of religion in these debates

Oh no we aren't.  

purely political reasoning has never proved a powerful enough force to change habits of a lifetime. Any such change depends on deep transitions of the human spirit that religious people have called conversion.

Let's forget about facts, science, and soberly assessing the problems of climate change and their proposed solutions, and instead make it some sort of religious crusade. Environmental hysteria is hard enough to take seriously without investing it with mystical nonsense.