Religious Fundamentalism Explained by Michael Crichton
One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
Michael Crichton
Extract from Michael Crichton Speech - Environmentalism as Religion circa 2003.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind.
If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious..because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief...
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good.
On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible...
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of an underlying truth.
Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false...
At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast...So it's time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
Religious Articles Index
Origins Christianity
- Environmentalism 50 Years of Observation
- Government Study on Climate Change Raises Questions
- Paradise California Fire Ignore Natural Causes
- Ecology as Environmental Socialism
- Peripheral Virginia Versus Climate Change Activism
- Nature's End? Crackpots Get It Wrong Again
- Our Obsession with Armageddon, Some Welcome It
- Science Ignorance Doomed Biosphere 2
- Common Sense Environmentalism
- Spiritual Ecology Versus Science
- Green Religion Won't Save Appalachia
- How Ecological Homeostasis and Hysteresis Regulate Climate
- Ages of Gaia Writer James Lovelock Sounds an Alarm
- Writer James Lovelock Backtracks on Revenge of Gaia
- How Bacteria Created Natural Nuclear Fission
- 20th Century Not Warmest, Researchers Find
- Great Dying Mystery and the End of the Dinosaurs
- Bikini Atoll Recovery From Nuclear Blasts
- Earth Going Green Environmentalists in Denial
- Origins of the Moon and Life on Earth
- Virginia Congressman Confronts Climate Scientists
- Michael Crichton Speech - Environmentalism as Religion
- Environmentalism as Religion by Michael Fumento
- Environmentalism's Fear-Loathing of Technology
- Shockingly Rapid Climatic Shifts are Real
- Hypsithermal Warming Spreads Civilization 6000-9000 BC
- Dr. James Hansen Paid Environmentalist
- NASA Scientist Demands Prosecution Climate Change Critics
- Dissecting Al Gore's Book Earth in the Balance
- Dr. Easterbrook on Climate Change
- Science Rejected by Global Warming Alarmists
- Separation of Environmentalism and State
- 2009-10 Record Cold Stumps Environmentalists
- Taking a Sober View on Climate Change
- Second Great Awakening An Overview
- Critical Review Regressive Liberalism
- Address Corporate Culture Before Handing Out Money
- Postmodernism Attacks Reason, Science, and Culture
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