[Pseudonym]

I want free Cherrios!

[Blue_Nose]

Pseudonym wrote:

I want free Cherrios!

People are going to wonder what the hell happened on page 5 that made page 6 start with that

[Pseudonym]

Maybe it will teach them to read the whole damn thread before commenting. We have enough of that crap as it is.

[Psudo]

Blue_Nose wrote:

"Environmentalism as religion" is a pretty straightforward topic, [. . .]
You can't make such a bold argument without definitively proving that it's a religion in the first place

I don't need environmentalism to entirely be a religion for the religious aspect of it to conflict with mine. And you've conceded often enough that these elements exist.

What you're looking for is a monolithic cosmology shared by all environmentalists. Since not all environmentalists are the religious type, and there is diversity even among the religious types on that point, there won't ever be one. But the same is true of any religion. Especially if you get into decentralized religions like Hindu or Wicca, it's not necessary for religious adherents to agree on any specific point of cosmology, but merely agree usually and generally. If we sharply define a subset of environmentalists who intentionally put the best interest of all ecology over the best interest of humans specifically and call this concept "ecologism", I think it's apparent that they have as much cosmology in common as a decentralized religion.

That is where the points I've made come into play: this group usually and generally agrees that environmental waste constitutes immorality, that environmental disaster imposes ecological justice upon those wasteful, that humans are a mere child in a greater biosphere, that we either completely lack uniqueness as a species or that our uniqueness is abhorrent (here I'm thinking of the "mankind is a virus" speech). Do these things not describe who mankind is within the greater cosmos? Is that not cosmology?

In either case, I think this conversation has progressed as far as it will. I can't define my thoughts more clearly than this, so take it or leave it as it lies.

[Zipperfish]

Psudo wrote:

That is where the points I've made come into play: this group usually and generally agrees that environmental waste constitutes immorality, that environmental disaster imposes ecological justice upon those wasteful, that humans are a mere child in a greater biosphere, that we either completely lack uniqueness as a species or that our uniqueness is abhorrent (here I'm thinking of the "mankind is a virus" speech). Do these things not describe who mankind is within the greater cosmos? Is that not cosmology?

In either case, I think this conversation has progressed as far as it will. I can't define my thoughts more clearly than this, so take it or leave it as it lies.

Perhaps it is your own religious, or at least ideological, feelings permeating the issue. Humans behaves the same way as any other organism with respect to exponential growth to consume available resources, etc. And a human being is made up of about a trillion cells working cooperatively (though each in its own interest), and each of those cells is more or less a collection of bacteria and viruses.

To quote John Gray:

Quote:

The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, 'Western Civilization', or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of a particularly rapacious primate.

Many people take offence to this sort of viewpoint, seeing it as anti-humanist, which it isn't (I'd say it's a-humanist). But from a scientific perspective I don't see any special quality to humankind as compared to any other animal. There is only one form of life on this planet, really, and that's DNA.

[Blue_Nose]

Psudo wrote:

If we sharply define a subset of environmentalists who intentionally put the best interest of all ecology over the best interest of humans specifically and call this concept "ecologism", I think it's apparent that they have as much cosmology in common as a decentralized religion.

Again, there's nothing in here that constitutes a religious cosmology, and I think you're still having trouble with the term.

Consider:

If we sharply define a subset of libertarians who intentionally put the best interest of freedom over the best interest of the state specifically and call this concept libertarianism, I think it's apparent that they have as much cosmology in common as a decentralized religion.

If we sharply define a subset of capitalists who intentionally put the best interest of the free market over the best interest of government regulation specifically and call this concept free market capitalism, I think it's apparent that they have as much cosmology in common as a decentralized religion.

If we sharply define a subset of women who intentionally put the best interest of women over the best interest of men specifically and call this concept feminism, I think it's apparent that they have as much cosmology in common as a decentralized religion.

Libertarianism, Capitalism, and Feminism are all religions by your standards. By your definition, having any values at all makes you religious.

None of your arguments to date can't be applied easily to any number of ideologies that are decidedly not religious - nothing you've offered singles out environmentalism (or "ecologism") as religious in nature.

[Les-R]

I am amused by this thread, and how both sides of the argument seem unable to parse the concept of hyperbolic speech.