Archive for environment

Inner Relationship of All Things

Posted in Atheist, belief, culture, environment, nature, Pantheism, random, religion with tags , , , , on July 27, 2009 by chouck017894

The ancient world, much more than the modern world, recognized the intimate connection that all life has to what we speak of as Nature, and they respected that connection as the direct and active part of Creation’s life-sustaining principle.  In the modern world shaped upon priest-written scriptural concepts of an imagined right of  dominion by man over Nature, this truth has been virtually discarded and the result has been the brutal rape of Nature and the disturbed planetary environment.

Our religions, at least in the western world, certainly have never taught respect for a fundamental law of  “god’s” Creation, which is that organism and environment always define each other.  If we remove the blinders imposed by the faith merchants, we can witness that fundamental law of Creation everywhere in the universe.  A galaxy, for example, cannot exist without the environment of its enclosing field of energy.  Likewise, human culture exists and flourishes in the environment of Earth only because Earth evolved an energy-network of mutually interdependent organisms—which may be symbolized with mineral  ores and plant life.  This truth happens to be the reason why early scriptural myth gives such value to “gold, bdellium, and the onyx stone” as having been in Eden even before “man” was created (Genesis 2:11-12).  Certainly it is absurd to regard these minerals in an economic meaning if there was no one around to covet them, so they were clearly used as examples of the value of the “lower” mineral kingdom to the maintenance of life.

Material based religious practices,  particularly in western organized religions, have never taught reverence for the elemental aspects (which could be said as used by god) that create and sustain life.  Instead they choose to foster the illusion that human consciousness and intelligence is unique not only in Nature but in the universe as a whole.  Such religious interpretation is designed only to gratify human ego, for it ignores the truth that intelligence as a life organism becomes intelligible only in relation to its environment.  Remove the life forms and the environment from each other and both become meaningless.  What this attests to is that intelligent perception exists only because it is part of an intelligent environment—for an intelligent fraction cannot arise out of an unintelligent whole.

Then there is the plant kingdom which, even though inanimate in its energy form, embodies and contains energies of material life just as does the more advanced biological life.  Western religions do not teach that lowly plant life illustrates an existing inner relationship that is ever-present in all things.  The plant kingdom itself exists because it is an extension—an outbudding—of an energy dimension that is even more elemental–the afore-mentioned mineral domain.  Vegetation is the innocent life that is, allegorically speaking, martyred by and for biological life.  This was recognized and honored in the maligned Pagan observances held at the time of the vernal equinox—the same general time that became adapted as Passover and Easter.

Reverence for the elemental foundation of life as demonstrated by Nature has thus been stricken from god-the-creator-religions that fail to acknowledge that intellectual life can develop and evolve only when infinite energy combinations are incorporated.  This means, by extension, that in the overall creative environment nothing is ever called upon to “justify” its existence.  This truth is not exactly a feature of Creation that material minded religious manipulators want people to know.   Instead they choose to focus upon surface differences, such as diverse physical forms or colorings or emotional drives that various life forms may possess.  The mental environment that is thus established and accepted as spiritual understanding is subsequently rendered sorely deficient in the quality of compassion, the very factor that elevates the emanations of consciousness into wisdom.

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Humans’ Place in Nature

Posted in culture, ecology, history, humanism, humanity, life, logic, nature, Pantheism, random, religion, science with tags , , , , on July 25, 2009 by chouck017894

Nature, the bearing principle of what we think of as material reality, has become strangely alien to western thought, and that mutant insensitivity has increased across the world—a situation due partly to religion and partly to science, the two answer-seeking indulgences which often rear up as opposing qualities.

Western religions have, by and large, pursued the notion that the creature man is meant to have dominion over nature and that humans are called upon by some divine overseer of the universe to control that life-sustaining organism we speak of as nature.  Science, drawn more to exploring how things work and evolve,  does so not in a drive to dominate nature but to (ideally) learn how to cooperate with nature and utilize the powers from which we became manifest as conscious life forms.

The western religious assertion that we must take control(dominion) over the wisdom that functions as nature and which produced our physical being is a rather infantile stance considering that as a complex species of nature we humans too often fail in even understanding or controlling ourselves.  We should take into consideration that western religious philosophy which professes to know so much about the nature of a supreme being remains curiously vague about the nature of man’s relationship to creative forces.  That vagueness attests to weak theology, and that lack of insight has infected humankind with a sense of estrangement from his natural being and his natural environment.

Science, which may be described as theoretical naturalism, customarily professes faithfulness to an indulgence in  rational consciousness which, unfortunately, is almost as indefinable as the mystical soul.  Both science and religion can only theorize from a state of limitation because the studies of both use humankind in nature as the object that is studied as representative of the subject.  And because such a technique focuses on external manifestations it means that neither of those theoretical approaches can act as a subjective observer.

Through such theoretical  exercises of science and religion we continue to feel that we are estranged in some way from the inner workings that function as nature.  Nevertheless, everything that is active as conscious life and all events active as nature are mutually interdependent.  Man cannot rightfully be understood as an object that stands apart from the subject nature.  Such a sense of estrangement from nature then encourages the self-destructive exploitation of the resources of the planet that have led humankind into the present day environmental predicament.

Like it or not, humankind has a total  involvement with nature.  Ultimately inhumanity toward nature is to deny humankind a future that holds any higher potential.

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