Channel: Guardian Author: Andrew Brown
It is good to know that two bishops are undertaking a “Carbon fast” which will require them to turn off their computers every night, rather than leaving them on standby.
Unfortunately, I am not very good at piety and it made me wonder, in a rather irreverent way, about the the environmental consequences of burning heretics. Is orthodoxy carbon-neutral? It turns out to be quite difficult to calculate this. Cremation is less green than burying people, but this is partly a result of the attempts that crematoria now make to avoid pollution, which requires burning the bodies at very high temperatures.
But an auto-da-fe does not need to be nearly as hot as a modern crematorium. The purpose of the fire is not to reduce the heretic to ashes, but to impress the onlookers with the horror of the crime. But even at these lower temperatures it seems at least as environmentally sinful as a barbecue and we know we are meant to be giving those up, too.
.... [Anthropologist Marvin] Harris is rather out of fashion now: he analysed all sorts of religious taboos as disguised ecological rules: the sacredness of cow, he thought, was an expression of the fact that the farmer who eats his bullock in a famine year might as well be dead, since when the rains come he will be unable to plough.
Similarly, the taboo on pork in Judaism and Islam makes sense in the Middle East, where the pig is a bad ecological bargain.
Obviously, if you are a true believer, this kind of explanation will be unsatisfactory. It’s also unsatisfactory if you are the kind of rationalist who wants all religions and all superstitions to be equally ridiculous and unscientific. And it offends, finally, people like me who dislike the idea that religious practice can be explained away or reduced to anything else.
None the less, the link between religion and ecology is worth thinking about. One of the things that all religions have are prohibitions which have to be obeyed “just because”. Heresy is shunned not because it is rationally wrong, but because it is heretical. But these attitudes aren’t confined to religion. Nor could they be, because they are indispensable for any large scale social organisation. If everyone stops to question everything, nothing gets done. What religions do, to some extent, is to internalise social disciplines so that they come to seem morally binding and quite impossible to analyse coldly. We’re going to need that kind of social discipline to cope with the shrinking resources of the world.
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