global warming as religion

Good news, bad news from Chuck Colson at Breakpoint...

The good news: identifying positions of faith-- for example, in Evolution (as a comprehensive explanation for the development of life) and Global Warming-- as positions of faith, and thus, a sort of religion. (Doug Giles labels this "Climavangelism".)

The bad news: monkeying with free association in labor markets and reducing "employment at will" to protect those who hold various religious views .

You don’t think that man-made global warming has become a religion? Well, a British judge certainly does...

That is essentially what has happened in Britain. In July 2008, Tim Nicholson was let go from his job at a property management firm. According to Nicholson, his dismissal was due to his beliefs about man-made global warming...

When he was dismissed, Nicholson sued under Britain’s Employment Equality act, specifically the part that prohibits discrimination on account of “religion and belief.”

According to Nicholson, “Belief in man-made climate change is...a philosophical belief that reflects my moral and ethical values.”

For its part, his former employer countered that “green views were political and based on science, as opposed to religious or philosophical in nature.”

In what’s being called a “landmark ruling,” a British judge ruled for Nicholson, saying that “a belief in man-made climate change...is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose” of laws covering discrimination in employment.

...a [U.S.] Supreme Court case defining religion decades ago as “a sincere and meaningful belief which occupies, in the life of its possessor, a place parallel to that filled by God.”

Colson seems bothered by this, but (at least) other evangelical political observers have taken great joy in the finding the "secular humanism" is a religion.

And remember that, last year, Al Gore argued that you could have civil disobedience morally justified in order to stop the construction of a coal-fired electric generating plant.