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Clarity Through Beliefs
00:07:59
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| You see, having a clarity about life, having a structure of beliefs and values is what enables you to get through the tough times. | |
| It is a bank account. | |
| You deposit money in a bank or you have equity in a home or you have some other form of savings for rainy days, right? | |
| I mean, that's the classic notion. | |
| So we're now in rainy days. | |
| And one of the reasons that I am capable of dealing with this, one of them, there are others, and I am in a relatively good position. | |
| But one of the reasons is that I have a worldview, an outlook on life, which encompasses things like this. | |
| I assume tragedy. | |
| In my book on happiness, I write, I have a tragic view of life. | |
| Therefore, I am crazy happy when things aren't bad. | |
| I have never waited for wonderful developments to be happy. | |
| Because the wonderful development was no tragedy is taking place now. | |
| That to me is... | |
| Remember, if nothing's horrific, life is terrific. | |
| That's what I've been... | |
| If you have taken my ideas seriously, you have a better shock absorber. | |
| That's the Dr. Marmer's term. | |
| If nothing's horrific, then life is terrific. | |
| Why do we have that jingle? | |
| I mean, because I've said it so often that one of you put it to music. | |
| Ruff's kid? | |
| Russ's kid. | |
| Okay, Russ, well done. | |
| Huh? | |
| Yeah, K-I-D-D. In fact, some spell it K-I-D-D-D. Triple D. You are impressed. | |
| You should be impressed. | |
| Very few hosts would come up with that. | |
| That was not a statement of bragging. | |
| It was a statement of thinking differently. | |
| Thank you, Russ. | |
| And now, ladies and gentlemen, we return to Earth. | |
| This is all by way of sort of advertising the importance of the Ultimate Issues Hour. | |
| It gives you the framework in which life can then not be just a series of shocks. | |
| I'm not shocked by bad. | |
| My view of the human species is very, very low. | |
| That is why I am just delighted. | |
| I'm ecstatic when I meet good people, of whom I have met many. | |
| Humanity stinks, but there are many wonderful people. | |
| So that's the Ultimate Issues Hour. | |
| Today's subject is nature. | |
| You know, between Yale and the Bible, there's more wisdom in five verses in Genesis than in all of Yale. | |
| I pick on Yale because it's the worst of the prestigious universities, but they're all bad. | |
| Watch No Safe Spaces. | |
| You'll see what's going on at Yale. | |
| It's really... | |
| We've got some video from Yale that'll rankle your gankle. | |
| I've never said that about anything before. | |
| Are we battling COVID-19? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Is COVID-19 part of nature? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So what's all of this talk about the Gaia, right? | |
| The Earth. | |
| The goddess Earth. | |
| So I'm going to read to you. | |
| I rarely do this. | |
| Every so often I read to you my column. | |
| And that's the subject of today's Ultimate Issues Hour. | |
| The Bible is right. | |
| Secular society, or much of it, is wrong. | |
| When the Bible in Genesis says, you will subdue nature. | |
| That's correct. | |
| But you know what they did before the Bible? | |
| They worshipped nature. | |
| And you know what they're doing after the Bible? | |
| Worshipping nature. | |
| Remember the Time magazine cover with Gaia, the Earth? | |
| I mean, there's an actress. | |
| Did you see this thing? | |
| What is some... | |
| Or a model or an actress? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I didn't know her name, but... | |
| Who said, you know, it's not so bad. | |
| Maybe it'll kill a lot of people and then we won't be, we humans are despoiling the earth. | |
| That's a very common theme among left-wing environmentalists. | |
| The human being is really a curse on earth. | |
| The biblical view is the earth was created for us. | |
| It doesn't mean that we abuse it. | |
| That's an absurdity. | |
| I mean, you know, my car was created for me, right? | |
| I mean, let's be honest, right? | |
| That's why the car is to serve me. | |
| I am not there to serve the car. | |
| But if I don't take care of the car, it will not be able to serve me. | |
| That's a given. | |
| So here's the column. | |
| A statement widely attributed to the great British thinker G.K. Chesterton describes the modern period as perfectly as any single idea can. | |
| When people stop believing in God, They don't believe in nothing. | |
| They believe in anything. | |
| One of these substitute gods has been nature. | |
| Indeed, of all the false gods, nature is probably the most natural for people to worship. | |
| Every religion prior to the Bible had nature gods. | |
| The sun, the moon, the sea, gods of fertility, gods of rain, and so on. | |
| That is why the farther Western society gets from biblical, i.e. | |
| Judeo-Christian religions, the more nature is worshipped. | |
| Everyone on the left and right cares about the environment. | |
| But caring about the environment is not the same as environmentalism. | |
| Environmentalism, for most of its adherents, is a secular religion. | |
| These people, many of whom refer to and truly regard the earth, As a goddess, Gaia, the name of the ancient Greek earth goddess, worship the environment. | |
| The man who, more than any other, started the modern environmentalist religion was James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s. | |
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Cameron's Apologia for Pantheism
00:00:43
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| Almost 50 years later, in 2014, Lovelock told The Guardian, environmentalism... | |
| New York Times columnist Ross Douthat described the 2009 James Cameron blockbuster film Avatar as, quote, Cameron's long apologia for pantheism, a faith that equates God with nature and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world. | |
| That equation of God with nature... | |