The New Climate Gnosticism

Except this is based on science and not mysticism

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

We have entered a period of orthodox ignorance as the climate crisis becomes a planetary disaster. The vast and growing data-based knowledge of global warming and its consequences is readily available.

That knowledge is overwhelming as it shows no reasonable means of avoiding the extension of the sixth great extinction to humanity and our modern civilization. We have the wealth, knowledge, and resources to reduce this disaster’s effects but cannot prevent it. And are unwilling to make more than a token effort.

Even our token efforts in conversion to alternate forms of renewable energy are based on the same mistaken concepts of unlimited growth and resource exploitation. That these concepts are the cause of accelerating climate catastrophe are fully understood.

That they can be ignored or acknowledged and minimized has become an object of faith among the Western Empire’s national leaders and cannot be questioned. The mass of the population follows this and accepts it mostly without comment.

Efforts to discuss the reality with people based on scientific knowledge and growing daily natural disasters, large and small, meet silence or denial. Why?

A fascinating article by Alan Urban, The Apocalypse Is Not What I Expected, solicited many commenters, myself included, lamenting this reality and the loneliness of those facing what cannot be avoided. At the same time, the majority has decided “Don’t Look Up.”

It is very ironic that within Western history, we have a similar intellectual problem from 2,000 years ago that is being repeated now. The irony is that this was part of the transformation of what became Christianity in the Roman Empire.

The dogmatism and willful ignorance that marked Christianity through the medieval period and is still very much a part of its destruction of our planet today suppressed an alternate to early Christianity. Gnostic Christianity was based on knowledge and individual spiritual awareness. Gnosis is a feminine Greek noun which means “knowledge” or “awareness.” [9]

The surviving form of Christianity is based on Roman Imperial rule. Catholicism is still a replica of the…