Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate worriers appear to be increasingly looking for ways to exploit people’s religious faith, to coerce ordinary people into accepting green destitution; into abandoning mechanised transport, into letting farmland return to wilderness.
Can imams drive action on climate change in Pakistan?
Imams and other religious leaders are an under-used means of pushing action to combat climate change, experts and religious scholars say.
Religious leaders have the moral standing to call on people and businesses to consider the environmental impact of their activities and take a bigger role in reducing their own carbon footprints and finding ways to cope with the growing impacts of climate change, experts said at a multi-faith meeting in Islamabad.
Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, central chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council – the country’s council of religious scholars – told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that imams in Pakistan could have “unprecedented influence” in bringing action on climate change.
But first, he said, they need training to both understand and communicate the issues accurately in a country hard-hit by climate-related drought, flooding, crop losses and other problems.
“We religious leaders in Pakistan can talk about climate change with people as long as we become knowledgeable about climate change and its other facets,” he said.
At the recent gathering, which drew scientists, religious scholars and academics, Charles Amjad, an American professor emeritus at the Luther Seminary in Minnesota, said relying only on political and non-governmental organisation leaders to drive climate action was a mistaken approach.
“We must realise that people do listen to religious scholars in mosques, priests in churches, rabbis in synagogues and pundits in Hindu temples in most developing countries, far more than they do to politicians, bureaucrats, media and mayors,” he said.
“This power of faith activists must be tapped for addressing climate change,” he urged.
Read more: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2016/03/31/can-imams-drive-action-on-climate-change-in-pakistan/
For much of the history of civilisation, during the Dark Age, ordinary people were prey to the unscrupulous – to tyrants who exploited the honest faith of ordinary people, to coerce acceptance of inequity and injustice. Then along came the Age of Reason, and the Age of Enlightenment. Instead of simply accepting whatever they were told, ordinary people started to question, to demand answers, to know the evidence. People started to demand rational government, justice, liberty and fair treatment.
The Climate activist appeal to reason has failed – their evidence sucks, their models don’t work, public interest is plummeting, and their habit of calling people names, when their shoddy science is questioned, is starting to wear thin.
The obvious, if audacious solution – roll back the clock, and restore the Dark Age of unquestioning obedience to arbitrary authority.
Another reason for the Imams to wag their fingers at their flock.
Oh but they do love that finger wagging, those Imams.
WUWT?
“Religious leaders have the moral standing”
ROTFLMAO
Yeah, like that “religious” leader who instructed his followers to murder anyone who did not buy into his version of reality.
“But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.”
JohnKnight @4/2 3:15pm: If there were any reason to believe that the Book is anything more than the raving of a bunch of ancient goat herders, faith would be superfluous. John Whitman @4/1 7:07am ain’t foolin’. Failure – or refusal – to understand the truth he so eloquently stated is the root cause of not just the CAGW insanity, but all the insanity in this lunatic asylum of a world.
Davn
“JohnKnight @4/2 3:15pm: If there were any reason to believe that the Book is anything more than the raving of a bunch of ancient goat herders, faith would be superfluous.”
Any reason renders faith superfluous? . . That would be true if and only if “any reason” meant absolute proof . . obviously.
Dark Age of unquestioning obedience to arbitrary authority.
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Eric Worral –
Dark Age of unquestioning obedience to arbitrary authority.
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is the roundabout picture –
Hans
Coexist. That means you too climate alarm thugs.
One of the precepts of Islam is that infidels are liars and their word is not to be trusted. They trust only the words of the Quran and the imams who interpret Shariah Law for them. Also Muslims accept they they will die anyway, so they may as well die in the service of Allah rather than suffering from the effects of the ‘irresponsible’ behavior of us heathens, infidels, gentiles and heretics.
I tell people that the analogies between the present age and medieval times are actually quite striking. In this age, the federal government and its employees are the equivalent of the vatican and it’s corrupt monastery system. A villager’s role was solely to keep quiet and continue paying up. Check out the early chapters of William Manchester’s “A World Lit Only By Fire” and see for yourself!
Proving my point re the profound shunning of historical fact here, Manchester’s ‘World lit only by fire’ : “Professional historians, however, have dismissed or ignored the book because of its numerous factual errors and its dependence on interpretations that have not been accepted by experts since the 1930s at the latest …”. “More effort needed, please”.
Manchester’s book is rubbish. At that point, what part of the world was lit by something other than fire?
Seriously, read Stark’s How the West Won for a quick, concise take down of the whole Dark Age myth. And then follow up on his footnotes to go deeper.
More effort is needed, indeed.
“A villager’s role was solely to keep quiet and continue paying up…. ”
Actually, that sounds more like Imperial Rome. As Roger Osborne’s “Civilization” relates, after the fall of the Western Empire, a couple of thousand Roman cities disappeared precisely because those cities existed only for local administration, to collect taxes and quarter troops. “They were centres of consumption, not production, and had no autonomous reason for existence.”
I guess they are running out of ideas. They’ve tried everything, gone everywhere and still people don’t listen. Gosh. Where do they go to from here? What’s left?
I think from now on, we should refer to the people who believe in AGW as ‘believers’ or devout/faithful believers. Goes perfectly with denier.
I would back use of ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ as an illustration over ‘The Gleaners’. However something by Hieronymus Bosch (Last Judgement) or Albrecht Durer (Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’) could get even closer to the ‘Dark Age’ problem. Islam makes a good partner for CAGW as both sanction Taqiyya or lying in the interests of the Faith.
Eric Worrall,
‘Was uns trennt ist die gemeinsame Sprache.’
Karl Kraus.
agonal indogerman.
This is what all this climate change nonsense is truly about…control. Wikileaks exposes how the elites use environmental cause to push for global governance. WattsUpWithThat should do a series on how climate control is really designed to rob people of their freedoms.
Uh Oh!!! Does that mean that if I speak ill of Mikey, I’m risking being suicide bombed?
Deliver us from carbon and lead us back the low-carbon footprint Dark Ages……….