Toward Ecosophy

I'm sorry to see Lindsay picking up Eric Voegelin's use of gnosticism as a polemic term; he's got a distorted understanding of the nature of gnosis, and it weakens what might otherwise be a solid critique. As for the religion of progress, that leads into interesting territory. One of the things that happens routinely in the late stages of a civilization is that worship increasingly gets directed away from actual divine powers and toward egregors -- that is to say, collective representations created and charged by a culture, with no connection to the transcendent.

The classical world was full of those -- temples to the emperor, temples to abstract qualities such as Peace and Fortune, and so on. Progress is one of ours, though there are others; Dialectical Materialism had quite a few worshippers back in the day, nations have their temples, and half of what went wrong with pop-culture Wicca is that while the old traditional Wiccans worshipped deities, the pop Wicca launched on its way by Starhawk and Margot Adler worshipped an egregor, "the Goddess," who was basically nothing more than the projected self-image of Second Wave feminism. One problem with egregors, in turn, is that their emotional and spiritual charge depletes, they turn into clichés, and after a while it becomes painfully clear to everyone that there's nobody home. The other problem is that their followers so often make promises the egregors can't keep.