Author: blueridgemountain_man

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When Academia Baptizes a Mountain: The Rise of the New Earth-Religion

Wesley J. Smith’s recent essay (behind the National Review paywall) exposes a remarkable—and troubling—shift inside the world’s most prestigious academic and policy institutions: the rapid ascent of the “nature-rights” movement. What began as environmental fringe activism has now won the imprimatur of Cambridge University, major law societies, scientific journals, and global U.N. networks.

The core claim? Nature itself—mountains, rivers, glaciers, ecosystems—is a living person endowed with legal rights.

Cambridge’s new policy journal, Public Humanities, is devoting an entire issue to this concept. Its call for papers is shockingly explicit:

“We urgently need to change the way we relate to nature. One of the ways to do so is to consider nature as a subject of rights, as a living entity that has the right to exist, to be respected, to fulfil its natural role without arbitrary interference and to be repaired when its rights are violated. The constitution of Ecuador… has recognized nature as a subject of rights and calls it Pacha Mama (Mother Earth)… Dozens more countries have followed… The views of nature as a being is expanding in a variety of realms from the arts, to philosophy and the natural sciences.”

This is not metaphor. It is metaphysics—and law.

The Premise: A Living, Sacred Earth

Smith notes the obvious: nature is not alive. Sand, granite, and air do not possess consciousness, agency, or moral standing. Yet Cambridge’s editors treat “Pacha Mama”—the Incan earth-goddess—as a model for modern law. The result is not environmental stewardship but a revival of Gaia-style mysticism 1Gaia mysticism is the belief that the Earth is a single living, divine organism—a conscious being that unifies all life. It treats natural systems as sacred and intelligent, often blending environmentalism with spiritual or neo-pagan reverence for “Mother Earth.” cloaked in academic respectability.

From a Christian vantage, this is Romans 1 in institutional form: worshiping creation rather than the Creator.

The Consequence: Human Beings Become the Problem

If nature has a “right” to exist without human “interference,” then several pillars of civilization become violations:

  • mining and resource extraction
  • large-scale agriculture
  • transportation networks
  • modern sanitation
  • energy development

Smith argues the implications are unavoidable: nature-rights law would make modern prosperity impossible.

This is not conservation; it is an attempt to curtail human exceptionalism—the biblical truth that humans, and not mountains, bear the image of God.

The Epistemology: Mysticism Over Science

The Cambridge initiative treats “indigenous lifeways” as privileged sources of knowledge about nature as a living being. Smith respects indigenous cultures, but he rightly notes:

  • these worldviews are pre-scientific
  • they cannot sustain modern economies
  • they are now selectively weaponized for ideological ends

In other words, the academy now elevates myth when it serves a preferred political religion.

The Politics: Anti-Capitalist and One-Sided

The call for papers warmly encourages scholarship on:

“the relationship between capitalism and the rights of nature.”

Conspicuously missing:

Any mention of the catastrophic environmental records of communist states—from the Aral Sea to Chernobyl to China’s ongoing ecological destruction.

When critiques run only in one direction, ideology—not science—is doing the talking.

Why This Matters: The Elites Are Converting

Smith’s final warning is stark. The nature-rights movement is advancing not because it is rational but because it is religious—an earth-religion that has seduced the institutional elite:

  • universities
  • scientific journals
  • international policy bodies
  • legal societies

People assume the movement is too absurd to gain traction. But fringe beliefs, once adopted by elite institutions, quickly become policy (e.g. transgenderism).

The Theological Stakes

The deeper issue is anthropological. When inanimate nature receives “rights,” humans lose theirs. The Creator/creature distinction collapses. Stewardship becomes theft. Human beings become intruders, not image-bearers (i.e. representatives of the Creator.)

What Smith describes is not environmental ethics—it is neo-paganism with legal authority, the inversion of the Christian doctrine of creation and the dignity of the human person.

Unless scientists, policymakers, and Christians recognize what is happening inside the intellectual centers of the West, this new earth-religion will not remain symbolic. It will reshape law, limit human flourishing, and weaken the moral foundation on which human dignity rests.

Source: Academia Embraces the Unscientific Earth Religion of ‘Nature Rights’ by Wesley J. Smith, National Review Online.

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Celebrate God’s Good Creation

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When National Security Turns Against the Created Order

One of the most striking features of our cultural moment is how thoroughly gender ideology has seeped into institutions charged with safeguarding the public good. Universities, medical associations, school districts, and corporations have all been reshaped by DEI frameworks that treat gender identity as a sacred category beyond scrutiny. But the recent whistleblower report from inside the National Security Agency (NSA), published by City Journal, reveals something even more troubling: this same ideology has taken root within our intelligence community—an arena where ideological capture is not merely misguided, but dangerous.

According to the whistleblower, a “very small number” of transgender-identified employees and activists inside the NSA wield outsized power, effectively steering workplace culture, intimidating dissenters, and introducing radical ideological commitments into the agency’s operational environment. This is not simply about workplace inclusion. It is about an activist minority leveraging institutional mechanisms to impose a worldview on the nation’s top intelligence analysts.

As the whistleblower puts it:

“There is a very small number of them, but they wield an enormous amount of power. And outside of the sick stuff, you also see a prevalent Marxist philosophy going on with these people in their chat rooms. They hate capitalism. They hate Christians. They’re always espousing socialist and Marxist beliefs.”

This hatred of Christians is not a vague dislike of religion in general. It is a targeted hostility toward those who still hold to Christianity’s historic teaching that human beings are created male and female, and that Jesus Himself affirmed the creational design of marriage as one man and one woman (Gen. 1:27; Matt. 19:4). In other words, their contempt is aimed precisely at those who uphold the biblical anthropology that gender ideology seeks to overthrow.

The whistleblower recounts that when ordinary analysts raised concerns—reminding coworkers that the agency’s mission is to protect the United States and identify adversaries—they were met with instant denunciation:

“They just got hammered. They would just start coming out with ‘transphobe’ and ‘homophobe’ right away or calling you a ‘racist.’ And that’s why a lot of folks are still hesitant to say anything, because you still have people at these agencies in those key spots. It infected everything.”

This is precisely how ideological capture works: not by persuading the majority, but by ensuring that dissent is costly. When the enforcement mechanism is social punishment, accusations of bigotry, or professional marginalization, most people keep their heads down. And in a place like the NSA—where people can lose clearances or career prospects for being viewed as “hostile” to DEI priorities—silence becomes the only safe strategy.

The theological undertone here cannot be ignored. When an ideology that denies the givenness of the body also breeds contempt for those who affirm the God-given meaning of the body, the conflict is not merely cultural—it is spiritual. What the whistleblower describes is a workplace atmosphere where those who hold to Christian teaching on creation, marriage, and sexual morality are treated not as colleagues, but as enemies.

The implications are sobering. Intelligence agencies depend on clarity, objectivity, and moral seriousness. An environment where analysts fear speaking honestly, or where ideological activists dominate key positions, is an environment where national security itself becomes compromised.

What this whistleblower describes is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a larger pattern: elite institutions across the country now treat gender ideology as a non-negotiable orthodoxy, and they enforce it with missionary zeal. When even intelligence agencies are reshaped by activists who “hate capitalism” and openly disdain Christians, we are no longer dealing with neutral bureaucracies. We are witnessing the politicization of institutions that were never meant to be political.

Defend God’s Good Creation

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How a School, a Therapist, and a Stepmom Unmade a Family

A recent Genspect essay recounts a heartbreaking story of a mother, Jeannette, and her daughter, Sophia, whose bond was shattered when ideology and adult interference replaced family love.

Sophia was a bright, gentle girl raised by a progressive, open-minded mom who taught her that womanhood could take many forms — that she didn’t need to become a boy to be free. But when her parents divorced, Sophia’s sense of belonging faltered. During a summer with her father and new stepmother in 2019, she abruptly refused to return home, emailing her mother that she was now “transgender” and needed space to “process.”

Jeannette was stunned. The girl she had raised to resist gender stereotypes now claimed an entirely new identity — one cheered on by her father’s household and a school eager to celebrate its “first trans student.” Overnight, Sophia became a cause célèbre. Teachers and peers praised her courage; administrators turned her transition into a learning moment.

Behind the scenes, the stepmother — a licensed therapist — encouraged Sophia’s defiance, texting her about new names and pronouns while implying that Jeannette’s doubts were bigotry. Courts then intervened: when Sophia mentioned once that she “wished she weren’t alive,” a judge ruled she should stay with her father. Jeannette’s parental rights were effectively erased.

Three years later, she has seen her daughter only twice — once in a mediated therapy session and once at a brief coffee meeting. Sophia, now identifying as “non-binary,” appears to have abandoned the transition path but remains distant. Jeannette blames not her child, but the adults who orchestrated the rupture — the therapist, the school, and the self-appointed “glitter family” that replaced real kinship.

The article ends with her bitter clarity: 

“No matter how many tens of thousands of children are afflicted by this madness, the worst of the insanity always can be traced back to the adults—the ones who should know better, but never do.”

We live in a world where a child’s confusion becomes a social victory, and where parental love is recast as an obstacle to liberation.

Read the full story at Genspect: When the Glitter Family Is Already Family

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Embrace Don’t Affirm