We all know there are all kinds of things that religion is incompatible with -- democracy, science, social equity, rational debate, blind justice. But it is sometimes thought that being an environmentalist is compatible with religious belief. That you could divorce irrational beliefs about imaginary friends, the subordinate role of women, and the importance of neoconservative government from rational concerns about the state of the planet. Sorry, can't be done.
To be a greenie concerned about the future of the planet, you have to, well, be concerned about the future of the planet. Religious people, even putting aside the Left Behind loonies, aren't really concerned, because they have an imaginary friend who will look after them if they are good and pray hard and wear the right clothes and don't cut their hair. Only atheists understand, deep down, that there is no divine Lone Ranger out there coming to the rescue; that if we don't save our own planet, no one else will. It is odd that the Libertarians among the religious, so big on self-reliance for individuals and communities, don't apply that principle to the Earth as a whole.
And religious people wear blinkers that prevent them from being greenies. To be a greenie means to wholeheartedly embrace the concept that we are part of the natural world; that we are just one species among tens of millions that have evolved over billions of years (one of the more abundant species, sure, and one of the most destructive, but there are certainly no special arrangements applying uniquely to our species); and that we are very closely related to many of those species, quite closely to many others, and related to all of them to some degree. Greenies really understand the proposition that all these species are in it together, that we are all cousins, that we all come from a common ancestor, and that all have either a complete right to exist or no right to exist, not some of one and some of another.
To be a greenie means to be fully aware of the complexity of ecology. The intricate web of life ties together the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in China with a hurricane in Florida; keeps the Amazon rainforest and the African desert functioning; is affected by an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana or acidity on the Great Barrier Reef; provides fertile soil and clean water and clear skies, free of charge; is best helped by those who understand that these ecosystems have evolved naturally over tens of thousands of years, not by those who think the Garden of Eden was a real place and that the Biblical Flood was a real event. Unless you really feel, in your bones, that you are part of the grandeur of life, as dependent on functioning ecology as an ant or an eagle; unless you really feel the wind and the sun and the smell of marshland or grassland rather than driving in your air-conditioned car from your air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned megachurch, blissfully unaware of being part of nature, blissfully believing that you are somehow above all that, that you have have shucked off your animal nature because you clutch an old book that says something about your species being created on a different day and being given dominion over the others; unless you really feel part of the natural world, then you can't really help.
Except perhaps to help fend off some of your brethren who believe that hurricanes are God's punishment for sin; that if we choose to cut down every last tree, it will bring on the End Times; that oil spills don't matter. Maybe you can run interference while atheists get on with trying to save the planet.
Anyone disagree?
Check out David Horton's new Watermelon Blog.
Follow David Horton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/watermelon_man
Jim Wallis: Glenn Beck Attacks Churches on Climate Change
Michael Ruse: Global Warming: The Christian Solution Is Bad but the Alternatives Are No Better
One of my distant cousins, Albert Schweitzer, professed a belief in "Reverence For Life." He believed that killing any form of life which wasn't aboslutly necessary was a sin. Now I agree that I'm not as radical as cousin Albert, but I work at being conscious and respectful of all life. The earth is our home and our souls are connected to it. I am not looking for another life. The one I've got and the place I live it, earth, is what my faith calls me to charish. I'm not looking for an escape.
John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
So let me offer one simple point. Your conception of people is immature, mindless, simplistic, and reflects an utter callousness and contempt for others. You can not flatly categorize people in such a dualism of the mindless, bigoted fundamentalists and the atheist who is somehow more evolved (and, in a way, holier) than his foil.
Such arrogance to ignore the complexities of people! Everybody, theist and atheist alike, should be offended by the disservice of the reduction of their being to such nonsense. And you do yourself the same disservice, because you are no lesser or greater than any other person.
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/opinion/op_ed/article/ED-NELSON22_20100421-181204/339023/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIIT330MmlU
And no doubt, that line of talk deserves a lot of mocking.
Scientific analysis does not translate into a value system, judging what should be. If we humans are the product of the biological forces of evolution, then we are just a part of nature. Neither better nor worse than anything else.
Evolutionary theory assumes both purposeless and randomness. A simplified ecosystem is then a priori neither good nor bad. Even if human caused, since humans are part of the process. Like any other predator. Or forces such as vulcanism, meteor strikes, or gamma radiation from supernovas. What survives is "fit" by definition.
Deciding we like diversity, that we find the natural world beautiful, is a value judgement. More akin to the aestheics of art, the other mode of human understanding. Which includes, even if you deny it, the cultural legacy of the world's philosophical and religious traditions.
As a person of religion, I should not be subject to automatic, knee-jerk condemnation by group. Any more than I should be as someone transgendered and gay.
How can expertise be no depth of knowlege or experience whatsoever of the subject? Illogical. And as illogical, then some other motivation. Anger, a scapegoat to blame, the inability or distrust of thinking poetically. Whatever. It seems more personal psychology than scientific rationality.
How do you know a prori what is essential to human survival? You seem to be arguing about what kind of human survival-- and that's value judgment. Why is human survival at all a necessity for the rest of the biosphere? Besides, this evolutionary experiment may have a few million years to go yet.
And what is "living in nature?" Look at my NW Indian art avatar; I do have some experience with nature. Might be fun if you suggest those who cause the problem-- through the materialistic economic systems of Euro-Americans-- remove themselves from the planet. Nice condemnation of a whole group, eh?
And can humans behave in unnatural ways? As a gay transgender, I love going there. Who judges what is or is not destruction in strictly rational terms? When those stromatolite aerobes evolved, it destroyed the dominant anaerobic ecosystem.
Destruction is what some or all humans are setting out to do? If that's a purpose, you're sneaking the religious idea of teleology in the back door.
Nice dig about "textbooks and randomness and stuff." You know as well as I do the assumptions of evolution. That mutations occur that convey fitness. Not because of any predetermination, but because of random chance. And that those unpredictable characteristics give rise to forms that survive in either new niches or in changed climates.
I cannot take this article seriously.
Probably because you are grossly uninformed.
All Christian denominations teach something called STEWARDSHIP TO THE EARTH
and most non-Christian religions have something similar.
Taking care of the Earth has huge importance as God created the Earth for us to inhabit and take care of.
The Earth itself contains a sort of spirtual significance for many religions as well.
Here is a good Christian example of this: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0800637267/
Please, Mr. Horton, get your facts straight before you start writing commentary based on your own misunderstandings of religion.
No, atheists are NOT the only ones who could understand that human beings have to take responsibility for their actions and that no one is going to swoop down from on high to save us, nor are they the only ones who can understand and appreciate the complex beauty of life-- how amazingly, blindingly egocentric for you to write this, much less believe it!
This sort of name-calling and lack of respect-- from both sides, religious and atheistic-- is part of the problem we have with communication between disagreeing factions in this country. You're not helping, here.
Get yourself a Green Bible. Or visit a UU or UCC or Episcopal church. Talk to some religious people who aren't all loaded on anti-environmental side of the teeter-totter; there are plenty of us out here. Geez, even the formal doctrine of the Catholic Church acknowledges that we are obligated to honor the environment as God's creation, and as such we have a responsibility to see to its health. Basically, do some cursory research before writing up an entire article dismissing a group of people as daydreaming idiots next time, okay?
Doesn't mean *science* is a religion, as the Fundies say, either, but the above here isn't reason.