Zmirak Summarizes the Zeitgeist
I've been struggling with what topic to write about. So many issues tumble around in my mind, and John Zmirak of The Stream hits some of them in his recent article.
I’ve enjoyed John Zmirak’s quirky but insightful writing on The Stream for a few years. His doctorate in English brings depth to his essays, but his off-beat writing style makes me smile.
I can relate to his comment, “A person could spend a lifetime patiently chopping off heads from the Protean monstrosity we face today. … The bad ideas, lies, and tyrannies of our enemies thunder upon us with all the spirit (and spirits) that goaded the herd of Gadarene swine.”
The war never ends when Christ’s followers battle for truth. Sometimes, it feels like we fight Hydra, and we’re attacked on all fronts.
I follow too many newsletters and social feeds, and now my head spins. As I mentioned in my subtitle, I need to figure out where to start. I’m praying for focus.
Zmirak’s September 27, 2022, essay, “Why I’m a Climate Denier and You Should Be Too,” covers more than the climate change movement but also captures the zeitgeist. Today, what is right is called wrong, and wrong, right. Our world is upside down.
Shining a spotlight on “following the science” and agreeing with the “scientific consensus,” he exposes the false doctrines of sexual confusion with “47 genders,” climate panic, and the devastating COVID mandates. In addition, Zmirak recalls the 20th-century “scientific” ideas of eugenics and the threat of overpopulation.
Science, they rebut, can solve everything. Really?
Scientism
Others correctly call this worship of science scientism. Author of Scientism and Secularism, J. P. Moreland, explains.
Roughly, scientism is the view that the hard sciences—like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy—provide the only genuine knowledge of reality. At the very least, this scientific knowledge is vastly superior to what we can know from any other discipline. Ethics and religion may be acceptable, but only if they are understood to be inherently subjective and regarded as private matters of opinion. According to scientism, the claim that ethical and religious conclusions can be just as factual as science, and therefore ought to be affirmed like scientific truths, maybe a sign of bigotry and intolerance.
Today many believe science is superior to all other forms of knowledge that explain reality. People forget that science is only a method to study the physical world. It’s incapable of explaining ethics or matters of the heart.
A corollary to scientism is elitism. Only the scientists who reach the proper conclusions will be funded (That’s how we get 97 percent of climate scientists agreeing. The others aren’t allowed in the lab.) Others who dissent from the correct narrative are canceled.
Ben Stein’s brilliant 2008 documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Required, dives into this topic of academic censorship and where it finally leads.
Climate Cult
Back to Zmirak, who sees the most pernicious “scientific” lie as the climate cult because “it’s the most deceptive, the least outrageous, the one most likely to yield to our enemies comprehensive power—which of course they would use to terrorize us.”
Our strongest instinct is for survival. When you tell people the world will end in twelve years (funny how this timing lines up with Agenda 2030), they panic. Fearing death, they willingly comply with whatever the leaders say.
When AOC forecasted the earth’s doom, despair held young people hostage and drove some to blind activism. Greta grimaced at the United Nations.
Governments kowtow to the UN’s climate protocols, often to the harm of their people. Putting socialism before profits, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies force corporations to comply with “woke” values.
Zmirak spells out the truth about the climate cult.
You’re the target of a global influence campaign by wealthy, white elites in a small number of countries who wish to centralize all economic and political power in their own hands. They might call it “sustainability” or “the Great Reset,” but what it amounts to is a planetary coup d’etat by the richest of the rich, who wish to pull up the ladder behind themselves, and enshrine their power as permanent.
He goes on to ask why we should trust these people who claim to know what the earth’s temperature will be in the next century while they’ve been wrong on many current issues.
COVID mandates have now been shown to have accomplished nothing against the disease.
An experimental gene therapy injection that fails to prevent contagion or transmission.
Confusing kids about biological sex and mutilating their bodies.
Not only this, but in the name of saving the planet, Zmirak explains how the elites plan to destroy modern life.
Today elites are banning fertilizer, shutting down oil pipelines, closing nuclear power plants, and punishing farmers … embarked on a long series of measures to make it impossible for the world’s 7 billion people to eat, work, stay warm or cool, or generally to … live. And they’re doing it in service of a theory about the future which rests on the same flimsy argument from authority as overpopulation and eugenics.
Worldview Failure
The elites operate from an unworkable worldview. The climate change policies are a ruse for power. The utopia of owning nothing but being happy is a siren song.
Yet, many refuse to listen to the truth. They prefer to cling to government lies or live a life of distraction on their smartphones.
How does one explain to friends and family that the elites are poised to push civilization off a cliff?
Wisely, Zmirak recommends no reasoning with them. Their beliefs are unreasonable.
Their faith doesn’t flow from the accumulation of evidence or the articulation of syllogisms. Knock down their arguments one by one, poke holes in their tissues of “proof,” and they’ll just stare at you, like monkeys who pelted you with their poop, only to see you toss it right back at them.
Instead, we need to recognize that this is a spiritual issue. Only spiritual transformation by Jesus Christ can remove the blinders Satan has placed on their eyes. We need to pray that God will open our eyes and the eyes of others to the truth of the times.
Choose Life
Over the past two years, the phrase from Romans 1, “God gave them over to a depraved mind,” has often run through my mind when I’ve wondered why so few see what is really going on. Many have a depraved mind.
God isn’t a tyrant. He has given us a free will to choose him or reject him.
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools…
28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind so that they do what ought not to be done.
Many, especially the rich and powerful of this world, have rejected God and become dark-hearted fools.
Dear reader, do not be like them or follow them. Instead, resist utopian dreams and choose life.
“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, and death and adversity; in that I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments, that you may live and multiply, and that the Lord your God may bless you in the land where you are entering to possess it.”
—Deuteronomy 30:15-16 (NASB1995)