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What a week of contrasting images we’ve been treated to: The vicar of God jets west to meet with the president in Washington, while the nation’s nuttiest ex-presidential peanut farmer jets east to cuddle terrorists in Cairo.
Pope Benedict XVI washes the feet of his flock with apologies for priestly sins, while Jimmy Carter apologizes to Hamas for America’s sins.
Hillary and Barack squabble over who’s less elitist and who can better deliver government manna to Pennsylvania’s embittered Bible-clutching flock, while the pope reaffirms the Founders’ vision: Rights and freedoms flow from God, not government.
It seems to me that society stumbled, on that spring day in 1966, when Time Magazine notified Americans that God was dead. A ninth-grader at the time, I remember feeling like my horse had jerked loose his reigns and was racing toward a barbed-wire fence.
The first American to notice that God no longer was directing traffic was Thomas J. J. Altizer. An Emory University associate professor of religion, Altizer had an atheist epiphany while shaving, one morning, and placed a call to Time Magazine.
Columbia professors took up the cry, and the news spread across campuses — from quad to quad and coast to coast. Journalists and scientists boarded the express, with politicians running to catch up. In the clickety-clack of accelerating rebellion, we learned that Earth — absent God — had developed its own soul and a beating heart.
As a just-turned teenager, the news of God’s death — less than three years after Kennedy’s assassination — was almost too much for me to bear. Stripped of my two protectors, I wondered who would arrest the advancing glaciers? Who would stop Khrushchev’s Cubans?
If Kennedy’s charisma made Catholicism tolerable to the terrestrial left, his death — plus God’s untimely exit — destroyed the fragile balance between politics and religion in America. It’s been no-quarter warfare, ever since, with bureaucratic toadies, ACLU lawyers and Sunday-school grads tugging the Ten Commandments in opposite directions.
According to the American religious identification survey, Catholic pews are emptying, while the fastest growing religious franchise in America is “Wicca,” a neopagan cult better known as witchcraft.
Conversion to neopagan “Earth-centric” cults, such as neo-druidism, is doubling every two years. Neodruids observe the ritual sacrifice of life to the “Earth Mother,” (children are safe; it’s plants-only, today) and their churches are called “groves.” The most famous neo-druidic American grove is rooted in Berkeley, Calif.’s loamy soil.
Neopagans reject the Old Testament notion of a covenant between God and man. Man is no different than his brothers: the spotted owl, the snail darter and the kangaroo rat. Each arrived, accidentally, after the universe exploded into being 15 billion years ago, and we’re all rushing, side-by-side, toward nothing.
The neopagan left has internalized the phrase “raping the planet,” graphically. This explains the implacable efforts to block drilling in ANWR or — closer to home — on the Roan Plateau. While Colorado’s electricity rates jump 10 percent and diesel fuel hovers around $5 per gallon, Democrat legislators chant their fealty to the Earth Mother and stymie new energy production.
On April 10 of this year, the United States Geological Survey released its long-awaited study of the Bakken Formation, an enormous, 25,000-squaremile oil bearing shale deposit that spans the Dakotas, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
The USGS called its survey finding, “the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed,” and projected — using existing technology — a recovery of 4 billion barrels.
You didn’t learn about the Bakken discovery in the media, because April 10 coincided with the 126th anniversary of America’s first Arbor Day in 1872, and druidic news reporters were too busy celebrating with “waters-oflife” (hard liquor) toasts to trees.
Even assuming America continues her consumption of oil (20 million barrels per week), the Bakken and ANWR reserves would eliminate the need for Middle Eastern oil shipments. But — since this also would mean drilling the Earth Mother — it’s a political pipe dream. Instead, you can count on increased parking restrictions, tax hikes for expanded municipal bus fleets, more wireless toll roads, increased surveillance of your license plates and soaring gas and food prices. The druidic priests of the elected left assure us we can fuel all necessary vehicles (those reserved for use by grove caretakers) with a corn byproduct called ethanol. Forty percent of America’s arable land will be converted to auto fuel production instead of food production. We won’t rape the Mother; we will suckle, gently, at her teat.
The problem with this pagan pietà is that Earth’s children are starving. We need more grain — not less — and farmers in the Americas are frantically converting their fields to fuel production.
A Fortune magazine report (reprinted on CNNMoney.com) reveals that the grain required to fill a 25-gallon sport utility vehicle gas tank with ethanol would feed a starving child for a full year. The article continues: “If today’s entire U.S. grain harvest were converted into fuel for cars, it would still satisfy less than one-sixth of U.S. demand.”
In order to power America’s automotive fleet entirely with ethanol, we’d have to eliminate 218 million vehicles, while substituting busses, bicycles and bipedal transportation. It’s a crazy and unworkable scheme. But it’s also part of the druidic master plan, and it’s coming to your town, tomorrow.
The U.N. reports that Earth is experiencing its worst famine crisis in decades, and — assuming substitution of ethanol production for food production — the numbers of starving millions will mount.
No matter what the atheist left is chanting, today, humanity’s days on Earth are numbered. The sun will exhaust its fuel, become a red giant, and cook Earth’s druidic supplicants like tortillas in an iron skillet. We should not stay, therefore, we should use Earth’s resources to expand into the universe: to “go forth and multiply,” accepting our Biblical charter.
Mother Earth doesn’t represent the boundaries of mankind’s possibilities: She’s going to wean us, whether we’re ready to leave her or not, and send us on our way. We’re headed to the stars we can see, and beyond.
Because God never really died.
<i>Addison Gardner's column appears every other Tuesday in The Aspen Times.</i>
Pope Benedict XVI washes the feet of his flock with apologies for priestly sins, while Jimmy Carter apologizes to Hamas for America’s sins.
Hillary and Barack squabble over who’s less elitist and who can better deliver government manna to Pennsylvania’s embittered Bible-clutching flock, while the pope reaffirms the Founders’ vision: Rights and freedoms flow from God, not government.
It seems to me that society stumbled, on that spring day in 1966, when Time Magazine notified Americans that God was dead. A ninth-grader at the time, I remember feeling like my horse had jerked loose his reigns and was racing toward a barbed-wire fence.
The first American to notice that God no longer was directing traffic was Thomas J. J. Altizer. An Emory University associate professor of religion, Altizer had an atheist epiphany while shaving, one morning, and placed a call to Time Magazine.
Columbia professors took up the cry, and the news spread across campuses — from quad to quad and coast to coast. Journalists and scientists boarded the express, with politicians running to catch up. In the clickety-clack of accelerating rebellion, we learned that Earth — absent God — had developed its own soul and a beating heart.
As a just-turned teenager, the news of God’s death — less than three years after Kennedy’s assassination — was almost too much for me to bear. Stripped of my two protectors, I wondered who would arrest the advancing glaciers? Who would stop Khrushchev’s Cubans?
If Kennedy’s charisma made Catholicism tolerable to the terrestrial left, his death — plus God’s untimely exit — destroyed the fragile balance between politics and religion in America. It’s been no-quarter warfare, ever since, with bureaucratic toadies, ACLU lawyers and Sunday-school grads tugging the Ten Commandments in opposite directions.
According to the American religious identification survey, Catholic pews are emptying, while the fastest growing religious franchise in America is “Wicca,” a neopagan cult better known as witchcraft.
Conversion to neopagan “Earth-centric” cults, such as neo-druidism, is doubling every two years. Neodruids observe the ritual sacrifice of life to the “Earth Mother,” (children are safe; it’s plants-only, today) and their churches are called “groves.” The most famous neo-druidic American grove is rooted in Berkeley, Calif.’s loamy soil.
Neopagans reject the Old Testament notion of a covenant between God and man. Man is no different than his brothers: the spotted owl, the snail darter and the kangaroo rat. Each arrived, accidentally, after the universe exploded into being 15 billion years ago, and we’re all rushing, side-by-side, toward nothing.
The neopagan left has internalized the phrase “raping the planet,” graphically. This explains the implacable efforts to block drilling in ANWR or — closer to home — on the Roan Plateau. While Colorado’s electricity rates jump 10 percent and diesel fuel hovers around $5 per gallon, Democrat legislators chant their fealty to the Earth Mother and stymie new energy production.
On April 10 of this year, the United States Geological Survey released its long-awaited study of the Bakken Formation, an enormous, 25,000-squaremile oil bearing shale deposit that spans the Dakotas, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
The USGS called its survey finding, “the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed,” and projected — using existing technology — a recovery of 4 billion barrels.
You didn’t learn about the Bakken discovery in the media, because April 10 coincided with the 126th anniversary of America’s first Arbor Day in 1872, and druidic news reporters were too busy celebrating with “waters-oflife” (hard liquor) toasts to trees.
Even assuming America continues her consumption of oil (20 million barrels per week), the Bakken and ANWR reserves would eliminate the need for Middle Eastern oil shipments. But — since this also would mean drilling the Earth Mother — it’s a political pipe dream. Instead, you can count on increased parking restrictions, tax hikes for expanded municipal bus fleets, more wireless toll roads, increased surveillance of your license plates and soaring gas and food prices. The druidic priests of the elected left assure us we can fuel all necessary vehicles (those reserved for use by grove caretakers) with a corn byproduct called ethanol. Forty percent of America’s arable land will be converted to auto fuel production instead of food production. We won’t rape the Mother; we will suckle, gently, at her teat.
The problem with this pagan pietà is that Earth’s children are starving. We need more grain — not less — and farmers in the Americas are frantically converting their fields to fuel production.
A Fortune magazine report (reprinted on CNNMoney.com) reveals that the grain required to fill a 25-gallon sport utility vehicle gas tank with ethanol would feed a starving child for a full year. The article continues: “If today’s entire U.S. grain harvest were converted into fuel for cars, it would still satisfy less than one-sixth of U.S. demand.”
In order to power America’s automotive fleet entirely with ethanol, we’d have to eliminate 218 million vehicles, while substituting busses, bicycles and bipedal transportation. It’s a crazy and unworkable scheme. But it’s also part of the druidic master plan, and it’s coming to your town, tomorrow.
The U.N. reports that Earth is experiencing its worst famine crisis in decades, and — assuming substitution of ethanol production for food production — the numbers of starving millions will mount.
No matter what the atheist left is chanting, today, humanity’s days on Earth are numbered. The sun will exhaust its fuel, become a red giant, and cook Earth’s druidic supplicants like tortillas in an iron skillet. We should not stay, therefore, we should use Earth’s resources to expand into the universe: to “go forth and multiply,” accepting our Biblical charter.
Mother Earth doesn’t represent the boundaries of mankind’s possibilities: She’s going to wean us, whether we’re ready to leave her or not, and send us on our way. We’re headed to the stars we can see, and beyond.
Because God never really died.
<i>Addison Gardner's column appears every other Tuesday in The Aspen Times.</i>
