Archive for nature

Christianity, An Urbanized Faith

Posted in agnoticism, Atheism, Atheist, belief, Christianity, culture, faith, history, nature, random, religion, thoughts with tags , , , , on June 1, 2010 by chouck017894

Christianity can be said to have been formulated by and for city dwellers.  Rome was certainly Christianity’s nursery, and the great outlying cities of Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus and Alexandria served as its teething rings.  As Roman domination surged after Octavian became sole ruler of the Roman world (as Augustus, 34 BCE), the cultural attractions and economic allure of Rome developed steadily.  Augustus was a patron of the arts, and maintained close friendship with Ovid, Horace, Vergil, and Livy.  The phrase “the Augustan age” became a synonym for this timeframe in which literature and architecture triumphed.  This environment was to influence events that would result in the initiation of a defiant new cult that would evolve into Christianity.  There arose, as a consequence, a subtle urban style about the faith’s character quite unlike the world’s more nature-focused faiths of the peasantry.  This has led some scholars  to assess Christianity’s elaborate atmosphere as the most unnatural religion in the world, for it functions not so much on what one may feel inwardly but upon what one wills.  That, of course, reflects the traits by which the Roman Empire rose to domination.

Christianity, taking root in Rome, could be evaluated as a religion in determined disregard for the natural world, for the alleged supernatural conception of the savior, the miraculous overrule of normal limitations, and the alleged physical resurrection from death have nothing to do with the world in which we live.  That, of course, is the intent, and the tribulations of the natural world are openly scorned in Jesus saying, “My kingdom is not of this world.”  Somehow that doesn’t ring true if God the Father created this world. 

Nature, “in the likeness” of the power and force that is personified as God, is amoral (neither good nor evil) in its implementation and operation.  Pagan reverence of natural energy involvements as minor gods tended to offer mankind nothing greater than a numb resignation that this life experience is all that one could ever expect.  That didn’t set well in a willful and thriving urban environment that expanded and prospered while extending respect to the belief systems of conquered peoples.  Despite this extended tolerance, the empire found its governance being repeatedly disrupted by the civil disobedience of those of the Jewish faith.  In face of these continuous disruptions which threatened the stability of the empire it seems more than a bit peculiar that it was in this timeframe that God suddenly found it necessary to dispatch his only begotten son to instruct the (Roman) world in the technique of gaining heavenly favor.  In defense of the new Christian cult so influenced by urban abundance and self-alienation from nature, it dared to throw off the sense of resignation and pursue a more joyous prospect of an ultimate payoff.

In city life it was easier to ignore the seeming indifference to the struggle for life that appears to underscore nature.  The religion that arose within the Roman Empire was shaped instead to appeal to human nature’s deepest yearnings for joyous, abundant life.  Christianity was offered much like a divine lotto game: if you picked the right choices, you won; if chose wrongly you gained nothing.  It offered unsupportable promises, sweetly frosted with hope.

Many of the urbane principles that came to define Christianity were polished in the environment of the outlying major cities.  These were then later revamped and stamped as canon in which belief and doctrine and dogma and rites were held to be more important than one’s inward and indefinable life experiences.  Like a map of city streets, these codes were marketed as the best means to arrive at one’s desired destination.  The young faith was blueprinted in an architectural style, an assemblage of parts—not exactly a faith that grew organically or spontaneously.  Devotion to the resultant set of principles was declared to be the only thoroughfare into the willed love of God.  The only thing not provided for was the need for occasional rest stops.

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Early Challengers to Creation Myths

Posted in Atheist, belief, humanity, life, nature, random, religion, science, thoughts with tags , , , , on March 8, 2010 by chouck017894

During the early 1800s the long-held notions of humankind being a special creation began to be seriously questioned by the general public.  Openly questioned were such things as why there were so many different species of plants and animals, how had they originated, and why would God indulge in such extravagant diversity?   The public interest was as though such questions had never occurred to anyone before.  The theory of evolution was alien to the public, and the priestly explanation was that nature was an orderly and elegantly harmonious system that functioned under divine law.  Even naturalists of the time explained that all species were purposefully adapted to the places for which God had destined them—a weak variation of God’s ambassadors who had always claimed that everything was due to divine intervention.  But they neglected to explain why, if a species was “perfectly adapted,” had God found it necessary at times to intervene and cancel some species.

One of the great landmarks in mankind’s exploration of the living world was the discovery that all things—plant or animal—were composed of cells.  In 1838 Mathias Jacob Schleiden, a German botanist, described how all plants were composed of cells.  At nearly the same time a German anatomist, Theodor Schwann, found that cells were the basis of all animal tissue.  The truth of cell composition being the basis for all life was set firmly into place in 1864 by the French scientist Louis Pasteur.  His experiments demonstrated conclusively that every cell—even the smallest bacteria—is the product of other cells.  The secret of life was shown to be the creative power that is held in the infinitely tiny, self-replicating, self-sustaining biochemical energy of the cell. 

While scientists were discovering the cell to be the basic unit of all life, it was a naturalist who advanced the theoretical conclusion that the cell was the origin of all life as well.  That was Charles Robert Darwin who advanced the theory of evolution by natural selection in his book The Origin of Species in 1859.  Needless to say, there was much uproar, especially among the devout, for the theory was an apparent contradiction of the supernatural explanation offered in holy scripture.

The Aristotelian concept that nothing ever really changes was embedded so deeply in man’s taught religious view of life that the evolution theory was deemed blasphemous.  Nonetheless, such men as biologist\scholar Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) and German scientist Ernest Haechel (1834-1919) were strong champions of organic evolution.  Biblical creationists found themselves disorganized and numbed into near silence as men such as these contributed their theories to textbooks which would inspire and instruct new scientists who would throw open the doors to remarkable discoveries in the twentieth century.

In the 1900s  new discoveries in astronomy stimulated people’s rethinking about the evolution of life.  The atmosphere of the planets Saturn and Jupiter, it was discovered, had no oxygen, but was composed of methane and ammonia.  This got astronomers, naturalists, philosophers and others to wondering if Earth had once been similar to those planets before the advent of life.

In the 1920s two independent researchers published papers on how organic compounds could have arisen out of such conditions.  One was a Russian biochemist, A. I. Oparin, and the other was J. B. S. Haldane, a British biologist.  Both had reached the same conclusion independently that organic compounds could have been created by vast amounts of energy generated by the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation upon such an atmosphere. They pointed out that another active principle in activating life would have been the tremendous electrical storms that repeatedly charged the atmosphere over millions of years and the compound would become charged with self-replicating properties.  The supernatural explanations so long offered by religious myths began to crumble under provable demonstrations of cause and effect.

And yet even in the closing days of the twentieth century so rich in technological wonders the stubbornly “faithful” remained convinced that it was all due to Intelligent Design and some being saying “Let there be….”

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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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Urban-Bred Christianity

Posted in Bible, Christianity, culture, enlightenment, humanity, life, meaning of life, naturalism, nature, random, religion, thoughts with tags , , , , , on June 16, 2009 by chouck017894

Unlike Judaism and Islam in the western world, the spiritual perception that is Christianity had its inception, emphasis, message and character in the urban centers of the Roman Empire.  Economic and cultural attractions of city life, especially Rome, thus made a deep and lasting influence on the developing movement, which undoubtedly accounts for Christianity being the most unnatural religion in the world.

The faithful will, of course, protest this, but grant some charity to rational thought.  It is historic fact that for around 1500 years after the advent of what became the Christian theory of spiritual meaning, the prime and most steadfast opposition to it came from the nature  religions of the peasantry.  The practice of walling oneself into a limited artificial space to attain an illusion of oneness with the out-of-this-world Creator seemed demonstratively contrary to the Creator’s  expressions to those who were accustomed to working with nature.  Surrounded with the awesome atmosphere of nature, resplendent with untainted air, sky, clouds, stars, mountains, seas, trees, flowers and astonishing diversity of life, there was a natural sense of oneness with all these things.  There was no need for droning sermons by ego-centered practitioners of an improvable theory: in the walled-in Christian atomosphere faith became not what one felt and experienced but was only what one attempted to will into feeling.

More than any other faith system, the Christian approach to spiritual meaning has been that nature is a force that is to be dominated and any sense of oneness with all else in nature has been looked upon as causing man to in someway lose mastery.  This is one of Christian religion’s many half truths.   Nature, as enticing as it is, is not really the face of immorality even though below the aesthetic surfaces everything pursues its existence only at the expense of something else—a system of predators and prey apparently instituted by intelligent design.  And this everything-lives-at-the-expense-of-something-else playbill of nature happens to be the framework and general idea behind the entire Old Testament and which glaringly confirms that the evil and deceptions of  man far exceed the most vicious of nature’s predators.  It is this nature of  man that must be overcome and dominated by man, not the indiscriminate environment that is merely the bearing principle of matter life.

Ethics and morality are, after all, concepts of man, not nature.  This, of course, is held up in western religions–especially Christianity–as evidence of man’s superiority, and so all of man’s artificial constructs are claimed to more  closely reflect the perceived supernatural essence that is thought of as god.  This at least extends the hope of life beyond life as opposed to the nature religions that numbed the spirit with resignation that as part of nature man is held in a system that is indifferent to the concept of good and evil.

On the other hand, sealing believers away in orderly, artificial enclosures with light filtered through colored glass, stocked with altars and incense and secluded away from the open sky and earthy scents is not the best way to transend  personal nature.  Such man-created objects only gratify the apprehensive ego.  Ultimatelly the only true shrine to life is within ourselves.

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Religion, Nature and Sex

Posted in Atheist, Bible, biological traits, Christianity, culture, freethought, humanity, life, meaning of life, naturalism, random, religion, sex taboos with tags , , , , , , , on June 4, 2009 by chouck017894

The three organized religions of the western world—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—have been cultivated upon a strong sense of man’s superiority to nature, provoking in that ego-centered illusion the attitude that in nature’s diversity dwells the contamination of evil.  Western organized religions are not exactly philosphies of life: they are philosphies of otherworldly speculations.  To pass judgment upon nature from such an arid obsession is to assure failure across all human relationships, for such judgment is an assault upon the pulse of nature within each of us which reflects the spontaneity that is creation.

This negative approach to understanding the energy-activity in which we have our existence has resulted in millennia of needless emotional turmoil to strongly and negatively color the most intense and dramatic way that human relationships can be expressed: sex.   Thus, in our western cultures where humans are taught to feel isolated from nature, the diabolical result is that individuals will react in squeamishness at sexual attraction or even to devoted relationships.  Christianity with its anti-sex “saints” such as Augustine and Jerome fanning unnatural guilt about passion and attraction have not served as the shepherds of inner peace and contentment.  The natural result of pretending to be above or apart from nature is that the organic spontaneity of sexual attraction gets enthroned as forbidden treasure.

When the interacting energies that manifest as nature are assessed as inferior or contaminated with evil, our biological selves react by hoarding attraction and passion in a corner of consciousness to churn there with mental turmoil spoken of as sex on the brain.  This negative religious approach to nature and sexual attraction has never allowed a philosphy of life to be integrated with the belief in creative intelligence.  Instead of recognizing sexual attraction as a means of spiritual exchange between persons, western religions have installed a formula of prohibitions that reject such attraction as “animal.”  Nonetheless, the human physical being is a mammal, a manimal if you will, that has been taught by negative religious interpretations to think that personal ego reflects universal favor.

An example of grudging toleration that western religions extend to sexual attraction is shown in 1 Corinthians 7, where the implication is that marriage is solely for the purpose of avoiding the greater “sin” of being sexually attracted to more than one.  The  preferred conduct for  man, according to verse 1, says, “…It is good for a man not to touch a woman.”  The unlikelihood of that gets summed up in verse 9 as “…if they cannot contain, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.”  By that statement it would seem that marriage is not exactly a holy sacrament but a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card.

There is, conversely, in verse 7 of chapter 7 of Corinthians, also a sly nod to nature’s diverse expressons that are present and active within man.  There it is ackknoledged, “But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.”

Strangely, the gay community has neglected to utilize this statement of one’s “proper gift” as defense when the homophobes spout select biblical verses to justify their bigotry.

 

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Holy Prejudices

Posted in agnoticism, Atheist, Bible, Christianity, culture, enlightenment, humanism, humanity, life, meaning of life, naturalism, random, religion, sex taboos, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , on May 23, 2009 by chouck017894

Equality, democratic principles or respect for life’s diversities are not exactly the hallmarks of any rigidly organized religion.  Indeed, the indulgence in numerous prejudices is deemed in fundamentalist “faiths” as the way of winning favor with the creator that was responsible for those countless diversities!  Certainly the expected “Heaven” or “Paradise” envisioned by these arrogant institutions is that any divine reward awaits only conscripts: a holy reward that will consist of singing endless praises to an indifferent overseer.  In other words, never-ending tyranny is regarded by fundamentalists as the blessed estate.  Such is the vanity of religious certainty. 

Fanning prejudice and spouting hatreds are the big moneymakers for fundamentalist and evangelical type religions.  For instance, calling some life diversity “ungodly,” such as homsexuality, is not a provable assertion for it is constantly disproved throughout nature, and nature happens to be the bearing system of the Creative Principle: that is to say, indiscriminate nature is the fulfilling program of the very power which organized religions like to personify as a highly prejudiced “God.”

Seeking “god’s” approval or disapproval of something is always determined in evangelical/fundamentalist systems by some man-written exercise that is used by their corporate structured business machine (religious application) to manipulate as much of the population as they can intimidate.  The alleged secondary position of women in the scheme of life is another typical religious absurdity.

Paul is depicted in Titus 2:5 as admonishing women “…to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.”   The book  of Titus was penned c. 103-105, and it is Roman social demeanor that is being promoted, for the author was Roman schooled and therfore not giving testament of Jesus’ teachings or of god’s judgment.  Nonetheless, from this pretense of alleged heavenly commandment women are still being routinely put down as subservient to men.  The Saddleback megachurch in Lake  Forest, California, for example, is a big promoter of wifely submission.  If in doubt check the church website.  You will find the book of Ephesians (re-edited c. 100-105) quoted:  “So you wives must willing obey your husbands in everything, just as the Church obeys Christ.”  Degrading women as mere  subjects of their husbands does not balance with the earlier tales of Jesus’ teachings even though Jewish tradition also regarded women as inferior to men.  So are these churches really obeying Christ?

There is nothing more obstinate than those whose egos have been inflated with fantasies of godly favoritism.

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