View of God as benevolent and forgiving or punishing and judgmental predicts HIV disease progression. They don’t just want to pay homage to whatever god or whatever religion is the flavor of the year. Even though Lovelock continues to go to great lengths to be an empiricist, his 2009 book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning – published in the year he celebrated his ninetieth birthday – has been reviewed as a prophet’s wrathful jeremiad of planetary doom, studded with parables of possible salvation for the few. 1. Altieri, Charles. 2009. Style. An earlier guitar hero named Tommy Johnson – who is not related to Robert Johnson, but grew up in the same Mississippi county – was rumored to have gone down to the crossroads and had his guitar tuned by the devil himself. “The devil – the scent of sulfur reveals his presence. “Yes, especially when you think about the role of the element sulfur in old theology,” Lovelock replies. This was true even though he describes his time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena as one in which “not all of us were hippies with our rock chicks.” For both good and ill, Lovelock not only gave the planet a persona, he created one for himself, becoming “the closest thing we have to an Old Testament prophet, though his deity is not Jehovah but Gaia,” as the Sunday Times recently noted.

Conclusion: The Islamic Centre in Nanaimo stands as a testament to the dedication of its founders and the vibrancy of the Muslim community in Nanaimo. The winding logic that led the judicial panel to condemn a person to death for her sartorial choices illustrates not only the genuine military threat that Joan of Arc posed to the English, but also the extreme lengths the Catholic Church was willing go to maintain its tight control over Europe during the Inquisition. The exercise of the gifts is a manifestation of the Spirit, not of the person it flows through. The use of secular courts to determine intra-church disputes has raised issues under both the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause. They use certain rituals, dream analysis, and knowledge of case history in combination with contact with spirits. “I don’t think we can count on prayers, rituals, and good vibes to remove this cancer. Of environmentalism increasingly being faith-based, Lovelock says, “I would agree with you wholeheartedly. Plantinga has argued that at least one alternative to Christian faith, secular naturalism, is deeply problematic, if not self-refuting, but this position (if cogent) has been advanced more as a reason not to be a naturalist than as a reason for being a theist.

Now – thanks in no small part to Lovelock’s lobbying, at least in his own account – the great majority of Britons favor nuclear energy. The notion is that this will create molecules that will cause solar energy to be reflected back into space, replacing the reflectivity of the melting polar ice caps. They actually want to see concrete results that will leave this planet a better place for the future. “A net minus. You often hear environmentalists saying that one should do this or the other thing – like not fly – because not doing it can save the planet. In terms of saving Gaia, do you view carbon Calvinism as a net plus or a net minus? How would you begin to sell this idea of injecting sulfuric acid into a living being that some view in religious terms? An awful lot of people are totally convinced by your hypothesis, and even view you as a prophet.

Even the Jews who left Spain met hostility in neighboring countries. Not only was his Gaia Hypothesis predictably controversial in the world of science – as befits a radical rethinking of earth’s complex biosphere – but it was both revered and reviled by those who saw it as fitting in perfectly with tie-dyed New Age spirituality. Gaia would like it? Planet Earth, James Lovelock realized, behaves like one complex, living system of which we humans are, in effect, some of its parts. “The real cancer that afflicts the planet is capitalism and hierarchy,” he wrote. It could make, eventually, part of it, an intelligent planet. So, you say to Lovelock: You’ve succeeded in getting out this idea that the planet is a living organism. So, it fulfills a religious need and a political need, which is why they hold onto it so tenaciously, despite all the evidence that the whole thing is nonsense. I’m not making out Gaia to be a sentient entity and that sort of thing. It’s sheer hubris to imagine we can save Gaia. He believes that people want to do good, and if you approach them on that basis, you can get them to listen to reason.