The Great Global Warming Inquisition: Where Scientists are Galileo and the Church is Market Fundamentalism. Four hundred years ago, the Catholic Church found Galileo Galilei “vehemently suspect of heresy” and sentenced him to house arrest for the remainder of his life.

His offending thoughts and book were banned, as were all future books he might consider writing. His crime? Suggesting that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.

Today’s scientists are modern-day Galileos, viciously attacked at every turn by deniers with half-truths and outright falsehoods. Today’s Inquisitors are the Deniers, their church is Market Fundamentalism, and they worship the Almighty Dollar. Ultimately, their true religion is the same as it was 400 years ago for the Roman Catholic Church: Power, Privilege, Prestige. And, now as then, the Inquisitors are terrified by the implications of a scientific discovery because it threatens their position.

Religion Embraces Reality

Today’s Catholic Church has come a long way and now embraces the views of scientists, at least in the area of the hard sciences. The Catholic Church has an annual “Save Creation Day” and speaks of global warming as a catastrophe that will destroy humanity and much of God’s creation. The Church sees it as a moral as well as scientific issue. Most major Christian religions take this view, because they see no conflict between science and religion.

It has been the same with the pandemic: all the major religions followed the science and advised their followers to get vaccinated. Only some minor, extremist religions are advising against vaccination – and not coincidentally, these anti-science Christian churches typically push Prosperity Theology, which teaches that God wants you to be rich and we humans cannot destroy God’s creation. Or, if we do, it’s because it was meant to be and now we’re in the End Times, during which the good Christians who followed the ‘right’ religion will be raptured up into heaven while the rest of us die agonizing deaths.

We feeble humans attempt to understand the universe through science and through spirituality, and each is valuable and necessary in its own way. Science has nothing to say about morality or the grand question of “Why?” As my high school physics teacher put it to the class many decades ago, science cannot answer the question, “Why is a duck?” Meaning, why does anything, including the universe itself, exist? Science does, however, get better and better at describing and understanding the universe and how it works, including all that is in it – including us.

Spirituality, on the other hand, does provide a foundation for morality. Many religions take the view that morality is “because the Bible says so,” but in reality it is not necessary to invoke God or ancient texts to decide what is moral and what is not.

Philosophy, as practised by the ancient Greeks like Aristotle, was once the intersection of science and spirituality. The Greeks attempted to discover the meaning of life, or what it meant to live a good life. Today’s philosophers have abandoned this quest to the self-help authors.

Greed is Not Good

Whether one is a ‘believer’ or not, whether one is Christian or not, there is ancient wisdom in the Bible and other spiritual texts that we have ignored to our peril: The Seven Deadly Sins, for example, really are deadly. Greed is not good, and this is why the Deniers are terrified.

Much of the propaganda from Deniers focuses on the economic aspects of what they are attempting to deny the reality of. With climate change, their fallback argument after years of outright lies and attempts to confuse people about the science, is constantly that it is “too expensive” to change, that the world economy would crash, that poor people would suffer, and so on. None of this is true, and all of it serves only to mask the Deniers’ true desire, which is to preserve their position. Deniers don’t give a damn about the poor or the planet, nor about you and I. Like the Catholic Church of 400 years ago, they care only about maintaining their power, privilege, and prestige, and they see the scientific evidence on global warming as a threat to that.

That is why deniers talk of agreements to reduce greenhouse gases as “socialist schemes”; they are petrified that someone is going to take away their ill-gotten gains, will see them for the predators they are, and will change the economic system to a fairer one more in line with reality.

In fact, even Market Fundamentalism is a cover for keeping power and wealth. While many Deniers claim to be Libertarians or free marketers, in reality they have aligned themselves with vested interests such as Big Oil – because oil companies fund denial campaigns. They have adopted the doctrine, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” even though it means perverting their supposed values and humanity. The last thing either the fundies or major corporations want is “polluter-pay,” as that would mean the end of fossil industries like coal and oil, gas guzzling cars, and corporatised industrial-scale farming. It would mean a return to small-scale and local, and there’s not much power, prestige, and privilege in that.

Climate deniers have been active for years, viciously attacking climate scientists like James Hanson and Michael Mann – including death threats. It has been the same during the pandemic, where anything to combat the virus – or even admit that it is real and dangerous – has served as an attack point for the far right. Some grifters even go so far as to advise against getting vaccinated but are vaccinated themselves. Fox News is a perfect example: While their hosts mock vaccines, mask-wearing, and the severity of COVID, Fox requires that they all be vaccinated.

The Decline of Democracy

The pandemic has made things much worse. It has brought out the really evil side of the far right. They are actively now pushing to take control, democracy be damned. Many politicians have chosen to pretend that the pandemic is over, and there’s been tremendous gaslighting to this end. But as of this update (May 2022), COVID, along with the sickness and death it brings, is still increasing.

In fact, because we have chosen not to control COVID, new variants are mutating constantly. Long COVID is affecting many, many people. Now there’s a new possible pandemic, Monkeypox – and our leaders are taking the same ‘ignore it and get back to business’ approach.

We are in a very dangerous place. Our leaders’ denial of reality is killing some of us now and will be the death of all of us at the rate we’re going.

We cannot wait 400 years for the Fundamentalists and their corporate backers to be discredited. Long before that time – within a few years – we will have passed climate tipping points of no return and humanity will begin a rapid downward slide into the abyss. We must stop this Inquisition of our scientists and accept the reality of global warming and the pandemic, inconvenient as it may be to the Church of the Market and their false idol the Almighty Dollar. We must move to an economy and way of being that is built not on sin, but on honouring People, Planet, and Prosperity.