Do the AGW 'disbelievers' know what religion means?

The word religion indeed comes from Latin. Its one true meaning is still unclear, different etymologists throughout history demonstrated different meanings of its root but they haven't agreed. Today there are 3 or 4 POSSIBLE meanings associated with the Latin word "religio".

So I am not sure which of those possible meanings you are referring to, and unless you have a PhD on Latin Etymology and have done years of research on this matter, you opinion means nothing more than just one non-expert's opinion.

So...

Can YOU come up with a clearer and less ambiguous question?

what's deceptive is the relationship with the Medieval heat era as "community" - yeah, each area from which we've evidence replace into warmer. The MWP replace into no longer "constrained to northern Europe" - some examples: Tree lines have been greater interior the Sierra Nevadas and the Alps. The Anasazi needed emigrate simply by huge droughts. Lake Naivasha in Kenya dried up for 2 hundred years. in spite of irrigation utilization that did no longer take place interior the eleventh century, Lake Naivasha has no longer dried up for the period of the present warming. EDIT - honestly Amy that is 2 separate questions, coping with 2 separate deceptive claims made by using AGW proponents.

Religious faithful sums it up pretty well. It's not a term of abuse, just an observation.

In days gone by, the inquisitors, witch hunters and various tribunals all used panels of experts to support their ideology. What we are seeing is history repeating itself yet again with the opinions of authorities somehow replacing the need for scientific proof.

A religion is a set of tenets and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, or religious law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and religious experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction.

The ultimate origins of Latin religio are obscure. It is usually accepted to derive from ligare "bind, connect"; likely from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re (again) + ligare or "to reconnect." This interpretation is favoured by modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell, but was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius. Another possibility is derivation from a reduplicated *le-ligare. A historical interpretation due to Cicero on the other hand connects lego "read", i.e. re (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully".[5] It may also be from Latin religiō, religiōn-, perhaps from religāre, to tie fast.[6]

I think the AGW believers fit the first description better.

So AGW is a religion?

I knew that.

It has the virgin mother earth, indulgences in the form of carbon credits, and a messiah named Al Gore. Plus it depends on a belief system that doesn't require any science, just pure faith.

Tis but part of a new religion that grew out of pilgrim congregationalism in the late 1800s the movement was named Luddite after their founder and first prophet. The movement gained new ground when a group of the worlds billionaires that call themselves The Club of Rome produced a propaganda study saying we needed to cut consumption and population because the world was running out of resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Luddism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_Growth

Al Gore and his partners in crime Mann and Hansen are charter members of this cult and used Gore’s book and slide show as the strategy for achieving the objectives of the cult. But because they rewrote major pieces of world and climate history and ignored basic facts than even student geographers know by heart their misinformation propaganda instantly created a huge skeptical insurgency to fight their movement. Facts are that we have resources available in near space to keep the population of this world well supplied for several million years and by then we should learn how to go to the stars. But then Luddites look at their feet and the earth beneath them not at the stars in the sky only dreamers and those looking to better the world look up and out!

http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/inde...

And as both Catholics and Protestants have persecuted ancestors of mine I have a very clear concept of what evangelistic religions are and how to identify them. Skeptics always draw the wrath of true believers because god gave us the ability to see the fallibility of their arguments. Tis because of this ability to see clearly we usually need all of our strength to keep from being slaughtered with the sheep during the end game of the faithful!

Sorry, I don't speak dead languages adopted as egghead slang (egghonics, maybe?). I DO know the modern, ENGLISH definition, which fits AGW perfectly.

...and I vote for Ayn Rand's "looters" or "rotters" if we're looking for new labels.

Well when they say AGW is a religion, they're trying to argue that AGW 'believers' have blind faith in the theory.

Of course, when you examine the merit of the scientific arguments and sources provided by deniers vs. those provided by AGW proponents, it becomes abundantly clear that this is an extremely hypocritical claim. Most of the time deniers just make claims with no substantiation whatsoever, or they'll cite some right-wing blog or think tank on the rare occasion when they do have a citation. Meanwhile AGW proponents cite groups like NASA, NSA, NOAA, Hadley Centre, Science, Nature, Journal of Climatology, IPCC, etc. etc.

Claiming that AGW is a religion is patently absurd.

It is not global warming that is a religion, but environmentalism. There are people on this board who believe in AGW, but are also for nuclear power and CO2 scrubbers. I would not call these people religious. But for many it is.

Micheal Crichton:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

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. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. 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. 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. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them....

Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.

With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts...

Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

For the full speech:

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-environmenta...

pudding is my favorite snack