But the kind of knowing that comes from humility is the kind of knowing God wants from us. Too often I try to get everything figured out about faith. There’s a humility to their search that I want to emulate - that together we’re not searching for an unknown god but for one who is unknowable. While I often hear SBNR folks mocked for having a New Agey, overly subjective approach to faith, I’ve actually learned a lot from my friends who identify this way. “Spiritual-but-not-religious” (SBNR) is probably our dominant identification. Toronto is known not only as a post-religious city, but a post-secular one too. But what about any of life’s needs that we’ve missed? That’s when the Athenians could expect their unknown god to step into the cleanup spot. Hera, Athena, Ares: We can check family, wisdom, and war off our list of concerns. It’s possible that the Athenians maintained their altar to an unknown god simply to cover all their bases. And I wonder which altar he’d think we have dedicated “to an unknown god” (verse 23). I see him “deeply distressed to see that the city full of idols” (verse 16). WHENEVER I READ about Paul’s tour of Athens in Acts 17, I picture him walking in my own city of Toronto to discern the “objects of worship” (verse 23). Start doing good things! Everything good that happens means more good things can and will happen, and. His prescription was just like a "doom loop," but moving in the opposite, and positive, direction. His book was about how to stimulate economic development in underdeveloped regions. I value the copy I have! Myrdal makes clear that the phenomenon he describes can operate in both directions. That book was published in 1957, and I believe it is now out of print. The title of the book I am talking about is Economic Theory And Under-Developed Regions. More or less by chance, I picked up a slim little book by a Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal - who was, by the way, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. I still vividly remember my first exposure to a discussion that opened my eyes to the phenomenon known as "circular and cumulative causation." I found out about it when I was an undergraduate student, at Stanford University. I am quite familiar with the "doom loop" phenomenon - and also with its antidote. "Facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief." And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.Įden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday-these are deeply held mythic structures. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
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