Not all religions have gods. Author and blogger John Michael Greer makes a very persuasive argument that the REAL American religion today is what he calls the civil religion of progress. By this he means the belief, ingrained in everyone reading this from their earliest childhood, that human civilization is a steady march from the caves to the stars as Carl Sagan once put it, and that our future will be much like our present, except even MORE awesome. Most of us believe in this secular religion with at least as much, if not far more, sincerity than we believe in more traditional religions, and we will defend it with at least as much passion. The possibility that it might actually be a myth - a falsehood - would never occur to most Americans, and would be angrily denied if it were ever suggested to them. But some of us are beginning to suggest precisely that. In his recent book, Not the Future We Ordered (2013) J.M. Greer says: Peak oil, if its consequences are taken as seriously as they deserve, poses exactly such a challenge to the religion of progress. If, as seems increasingly likely, petroleum turns out to be the most abundant, convenient and concentrated energy source our species will ever know, and all future human societies will have to make do with less lavish energy sources, then progress as we have known it will end in our lifetimes. He points out that we like to talk about underdeveloped nations but you never hear anything about overdeveloped nations because, well, you just cant have too much of a good thing. I think its time we came to grips with the fact that our National Secular Religion is just a fairytale, temporarily made possible by 200 years of looting the treasure chest that Mother Nature left buried in our basement, and that we are all going to be living in an underdeveloped nation much sooner than we ever imagined. Thats not necessarily a bad thing - people were happy before the fossil fuel age, and they can still be happy after it - but our chances of happiness will be greatly increased once we can get our heads around the fact that our future is going to be a lot more like The Waltons than like The Jetsons.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 22:06:18 +0000
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