Opinion
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Who are the Branch Carbonians?
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
09/24/09 6:03 PM EDT
Are radical environmentalists members of a political movement or more like the devotees of a religious cult, one that might dubbed the Branch Carbonians? Truespeak.org’s Jim Guirardi suggests the label and offers an illuminating case for the latter in this post from the American Thinker.
There is much more to Guirardi’s piece, but as a sample, here are his 10 reasons these fanatical devotees qualify as participants in a cult. If these sound somehow familiar, they are based on the criteria elaborated upon in the 2003 book, “Kingdom of the Cults,” by Walter Martin and Ravi Zacharia:
1. Leadership by a self-glorifying, manipulative New Age Prophet -- in this case, former Vice-President Al Gore, though he is rapidly being supplanted by President Barack Obama.
2. Assertion of an apocalyptic threat to all mankind.
3. An absolutist definition of both the threat and the proposed solution(s).
4. Promise of a salvation from this pending apocalypse.
5. Devotion to an inspired text which (arguendo) embodies all the answers -- in this case, Prophet Gore's pseudo-scientific book "Earth in the Balance" and his more recent "An Inconvenient Truth" documentary.
6. A specific list of "truths" (see the Ten Commandments listed below) which must be embraced and proselytized by all Cult members..
7. An absolute intolerance of any deviation from any of these truths by any Cult member.
8. A strident intolerance of any outside criticism of the Cult's definition of the problem or of its proposed solutions.
9. A "Heaven-on-Earth" vision of the results of the mission's success and/or a "Hell-on-Earth" result if the cultic mission should fail.
10. An inordinate fear (and an outright rejection of the possibility) of being proven wrong in either the apocalyptic vision or the proposed salvation.
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