I know I've trotted out this 2005 quote by Umberto Eco a few times before, but it dovetails perfectly into Don Surber's Instalanched post today:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Keep that quote in mind, as Don Surber writes:

We have reached a creepy time in our civilization. Socialism has led to secularism and the absence of a religion is driving people nuts. The dark secret is that God does not need religion, Man does. Without God, there is no controlling moral authority. Atheism’s pretensions toward logic overlook the disturbing conclusion that if we are just clumps of chemicals haphazardly assembled through trial and error over time through evolution, then we are not our brother’s keeper. Kill. Rape. Steal. Lie. Cheat. For there is no God under that system, and no reason not to.

Societies need religion. But because all the past religions, like every other endeavor of mankind, were imperfect, the pseudo-intellectuals reject them all. They see salvation only through a new religion. Jane Fonda once embraced Jonestown. Oops.

Call it Gaia, but it is the same caveman reading the entrails of some animal to predict tomorrow. There is the same loony sacrifice to try to sway the gods to spare us. Offered up are SUVs (never pickups) and incadescent lamps and turning off the Eiffel Tower for a few moments. Divinity School dropout Gore makes a perfect leader.

Robert Giegengack, 67, seemed to tell the Philadelphia magazine what his younger colleagues are afraid to say: The science ain’t there.

“I always get sidetracked because, first of all, the science isn’t good. Second, there are all these other interpretations for what we see. Third, it doesn’t make any difference, and fourth, it’s distracting us from environmental problems that really matter.”

He said, “it doesn’t make any difference” because China and India with 2.4 billion people are going to build and drive 10 times as many SUVs as we are willing to give up.

(Why do enviros not go after pickup trucks? It is the Easy Rider rifle racks, isn’t it? Charlie Daniels’ admonition to leave the long-haired, redneck country boys alone is taken serious in Marin County and 90210.)

Glenn Reynolds has frequently written about the lack of seriousness on the part of the global warming obsessives who won't ban their own use of private planes and stretch limos, but I think the third rail of global warming is NASCAR. If Al calls for a ban on that, I'd love to see how his home state of Tennessee reacts if he decides to run for the presidency again.

More Surber:

I mock global warming because it is dangerous. Big business is slowly falling into line. There is your fascism. There is your oppression of scientists. A guy like Giegengack may be the last in a position to speak the truth to all this power:

“There’s all this stuff about saving the planet. The Earth is fine. The Earth was fine before we got here, and it’ll be fine long after we’re gone.”

Delaware’s state climatologist is in trouble for saying the science isn’t there. Blasphemists will be punished.

I don’t know much about science. But I do know coercion when I see it.

I saw Barbara Boxer on the “Larry King Show.” She said the debate is over. That statement of finality is more harmful than all the emissions from all the SUVs ever built. The politicians are using this to expand their power. This is the Patriot Act on steroids.

Unlike the Patriot Act, environmentalism has been affecting millions since the early 1970s. It's the reason gas costs as much as it does (can't build new refineries in the continental US; and especially can't drill in the Vast Pestilential Wasteland of ANWR, ever ever!), and the reason why California had its rolling blackouts in the Gray Davis era, due to a lack of modern power infrastructure. As the global warming crowd gathers steam, watch for many more shortages and price gouges--and many more blights on personal freedom and comfort than anything in the Patriot Act.

Update: Gaia--and NBC--are feeling awfully schizophrenic these days: "NBC: Beware of 'Global Warming'; No Wait, Fear the Cattle-Killing 'Deep Freeze'".

Another Update: "YEEEEE-HAAAAA!"