"What can guarantee that people will behave in a just and righteous manner, if not for the belief in a greater power?" - The Rebbe, Mind Over Matter, p.15
    
 

The Climate Has Changed
But what about us?
 
We thought we were liberated. We, the secular heirs of western civilization - We, the most highly evolved culture on the planet - We, who pride ourselves with universal values and multicultural tolerance - We, who have long ago escaped the darkness of institutionalized religion, brushed off the cobwebs of myth and superstition, and who walk in the light of reason and science.
 
We thought we were liberated, but we were not.
 
And now the whole, wide world is quickly coming to know just how liberated we are not, thanks to the valor of a lone, anonymous hacker on a quest to expose the most grandiose lie of our times. I imagine it was a sense of righteous indignation that spurred him on to bravely breach the high firewalls of a certain ivory tower in Hadley, U.K., narrowly evade detection by the high priests of scientism who guard it day and night, valiantly raid the catacombs of their servers' hard drives, and tiptoe out with a fat file of facts which he dutifully unzipped all over the internet.
 
And what does that treasure trove of thousands of emails and research documents tell us? That the principal data we have all been relying on to prove Man Made Global Warming has in fact been "cooked," doctored, altered and faked. Even worse, it graphically documents how an elite club of just seven climatologists has successfully quashed all voices of dissension and impregnated academia, government and industry with their trumped-up and unchallenged 'facts' such as the 'hockey-stick' graph of rising temperature that increasingly drives global fear and hence the world economy.
 
This discovery comes none too soon. Because in addition to the billions of people who have already been blatantly bluffed and the billions of dollars that have already been brazenly embezzled from society's coffers, we are standing at the threshold of yet another Global UN Climate Conference.
 
Next month in Copenhagen, the US is expected to announce a 17% reduction in greenhouse gases and the European Union is looking to cut 30%. That would all be well and good if in fact our Herculean efforts to cut such emissions were likely to save our planet. But now that we only have science fiction to substantiate that claim, the only people who will surely benefit are those with vested interest, like Al Gore, who stands to become the world's first carbon-credit trading billionaire and the scientists that feed the faith in Man Made Global Warming.
 
Stepping back a bit, there seems to be an irony. First Western civilization trashes traditional faith, replacing it with reason and science as the sole arbiters of truth. Science is objective and fair, its practitioners wise and insightful. The scientist becomes an icon of authority in western culture. As far as most people are concerned, he makes medicine heal, nature lawful, cars go, and iphone touch. With our lives pretty much defined by technology, there's no great surprise that the scientist is trusted, and the higher his position, the more trusted he is.
 
Society somehow drew an artificial line between faith in the clergy and faith in the scientist. The fact is, once you give away to anyone your freedom to decide any issue, you have essentially committed an act of faith. If you pass it on to an organized group with an identifiable doctrine, you have in effect practiced a religion.
 
The difference is that while most religions center on faith in a Supreme Being, scientism places that unequivocal trust in man. The upside of religion is that man takes his infinite trust and attaches it to an Infinite Being - that kind of makes sense. What doesn't make sense is to attach such unbounded faith in limited human beings and the contrivances of their minds, however great those minds may be.
 
Besides, the objects of our adulation, the duly ordained priests of scientism, have gods of their own: Power and moneys, as we have seen so clearly in this past week. If you want to worship power and money, you don't need a middle man; you can do so directly. On the other hand if it's something absolute that you're searching for, why not have faith in the Creator?
 
If our goal really is sustainability, we would do well to consider the words of David Ehrenfeld, father of the modern science of ecological conservation in his book, "The Arrogance of Humanism". He said that any reason to conserve could be compromised save for one: That we have been mandated by the Creator to be custodians of this global ecosystem.
 
The liberation of Western Society from tyrannical religious institutions was a good thing. But they threw out the baby with the bathwater, having spuriously negated the existence of G-d, the reality of the soul, and the purpose of life on earth.
 
If you have to believe in something anyway, you may as well believe in G-d. That just may prove to be quite a bit more liberating, now that we can legitimately stop obsessing about the end of the world, and start focusing on making it the best it can be.

Dr. Aryeh (Arnie) Gotfryd, PhD is a chassid, environmental scientist, author and educator living near Toronto, Canada. To read more or to book him for a talk, visit his website at www.arniegotfryd.com.