A Modern-Day Noah Story--Without the Passion

I have in mind a certain system of religious thought. Can you identify it by the following clues?

It includes a cycle of stories explaining how life came to be, where it's going, and what will happen at the end of time. This mythos features a creation story that has sustained criticism by scientists for inconsistencies with the physical evidence of our planet. There's also a fascinating tale about a catastrophic flood-likewise scientifically improbable-that wipes out much of humanity. There is a strict moral code associated with this religion, which takes great offense at those who would violate its commands.

Am I speaking of fundamentalist Christianity? Orthodox Judaism? No, I'm thinking of the dominant faith of America's and Europe's cultural elite: secularism, whose disaster myth-strongly reminiscent of the Bible's famous Noah story-is now the plot of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow."

Roland Emmerich's $125-million weather-turned-horror film depicts the plunging of North America, Europe, and Asia into a new Ice Age. It begins with a flood, producing waters so deep that a Russian tanker floats up New York's Fifth Avenue, freezing in place when the rain turns to snow and then ice.

Dennis Quaid plays Noah. He's a paleo-climatologist whose computer modeling has predicted the coming disaster. Before the sudden onset of the deluge, he cries out-at a scientific conference in New Delhi-that global warming could result in the oceans rising, followed by a deep and lasting freeze.

This might remind you of what biblical tradition says about Noah and his flood. According to the Midrash, Judaism's ancient collection of narratives building upon those of the Bible, the reason God had Noah build his ark over the course of many decades was so that other people would ask what he was doing. The idea was that he would tell them, and then they would repent. But Noah's neighbors did not repent-they ignored him, just as Dennis Quaid's environmentally insensitive contemporaries ignore him.

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