Dogma and Belief

It's instructive reading the comments of one of SWT's clone apologists on the Sheffield Forum's thread about the tree cuttings in Greno Woods.

http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1275997

I'm struck yet again by the parallels with certain fundamentalist religious cults. I remember the days when years ago I tried to engage with these people when they knocked on the door wanting to enrol the household in their church of this or that. You couldn't ever make any headway with them.  They had been so well trained in sales techniques and had learned their spiel by rote. Once I was trapped on a train with a fresh-faced young scientology convert in Surrey who wanted to save us from our sins. He would not give up. We were his mission in life. The intensity and self-belief were frightening. You have to think they actually believe what they are saying. That effect usually has me dashing for the escape hatch but it clearly works for some.

It's about the uncritical acceptance of what they take to be 'the truth'. That truth is enshrined in dogma that someone else has concocted, that someone being a distant figure all the more compelling because of his haziness. The man on the Forum message board cut and pastes stuff from the national wildlife trust biblical pronouncements on their website. That's because he doesn't trust his own responses or ability to persuade people. It's on the website so the writer must be an authority. What he doesn't know or turns a blind eye to is the fact that the comments he's pasted are not the reason that wildlife trusts go in for conservation grazing. These comments were put together as a public relations exercise the result of a brainstorming session and designed to be plausible. The real reason that they use 'conservation grazing' is for the farm subsidy money it brings in. But then if you put enough mental effort into the exercise you can persuade most of the people most of the time.

As we know the whole focus is on management being essential. Nature just is not competent to run its own affairs. I'm surprised they don't provide daily instructions for each blade of grass.

What I admire about the Grenosiders in the film is their trust in their own instinctive reaction to what's going on. Let's hope they don't get bamboozled by SWT dogma.