All of modernity, and a great deal of Christianity, is based on the idea that nature is a fund of resources valuable mostly because we can turn them into something else: trees to paper, mountaintops to electricity and landfill, rivers into storage pools, animals into meat, oceans into fish farms, and so on. Nothing on this earth is valuable for what it is.
Corporations include human beings in this category of things valuable for other than what they are, and some moderns object. Economists, many of them, legitimize this attitude by claiming we don;t 'owe' the future anything. What, they ask, did the future ever do for us?
But this view is implicit in the modern world view that denies the intrinsic value of anything. From this perspective what is intrinsically valuable is subjective, like our preference for kinds of ice cream. What is 'real' is 'objective,' and does not include our mere 'preferences.' That our country could seriously debate whether torture is acceptable is a sign of just how deeply this pathology of the soul and rot of the spirit has infected our society.
Most Pagans realize this belief is false, and not just false. It is deeply destructive of any possibility of a right relationship between us two-leggeds and the rest of the world. As a society, we relate to the other-than-human the way sociopaths relate to the human. Small wonder that in time the sociopathic mentality begins to seep into how men and women of power see the rest of us.
When we experience the sacredness of the cycles of nature, see and feel the fields of life in which we are immersed, and discover that sometime even 'inert' nature responds to us in our rituals we know the more than human encompasses us.
Leaving our sacred spaces for the broader society more and more feels to me like leaving sanity and entering an asylum.
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Maybe we could try to make every space sacred. Maybe we need to have a sense of humor about how screwed up things seem. Maybe we are over-alarmed. Maybe this world is a nightmare with hints of the divine woven within the fabric of things.
I've tried a lot of religious paths and practices, of which many still strike me as having noble elements.
I'm certainly not a benign presence on the planet where animals are concerned, I've never been disciplined to eat only vegetables.
I don't know, do we obsess to the point of worrying about things like landfills? How much can we stop? Where should we focus postive energy?
I guess we all seek out avenues, despite the psychic conditions. Some of the time I succumb to negative psychic conditions, identifying myself with 'em... maybe even acting them out and increasing their power on my brothers and sisters.
Has educating people on what we share in common, be it material, ancestoral, circumstantial, abstract, etc. made a difference? Is it really a new gospel or an ancient one that's been obscured with obsessive tendencies to property ownership? Does it fall on deaf ears? Or do some want to seek and find?
What do we put stock in as a society? Thinking in terms of modern economics... Do we really compensate folks for the right sort of behaviors and outputs, be they tangible or abstract?
I don't know. I don't think I've suffered nearly as much as others have had to endure. I have had it pretty good.
My world's okay. Although my mortality and that of my friends and family lurks.
And my friends and family are where I put my stock, most of the time. At the very least, I try to repay kindness in a way that evens the balance.
My early Christian ancestors must've thought the world was screwed up in their time as well to be so preoccupied with subjects like the apocalypse and sin.
I think we Pagans are involved some because worshipping the Earth itself leads to wanting to treat it as sacred, and some because we are willing to think, see, and believe in unusual manners...but we are not nearly the only ones.
Whether folks are unorthodox in their religious beliefs and practices, many people of all religions and of secular thinking are becoming aware that the behaviour of the human race is profoundly psychotic, and are attempting to orchestrate some sort of path to sanity.
Thermal
Gus said;
Leaving our sacred spaces for the broader society more and more feels to me like leaving sanity and entering an asylum.
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