Our Religion

 

Artemis at Ephesus as the all-nurturing "Mother Nature"

While we claim as a society to recognize religious freedom, in fact we have a state religion. We call it, incorrectly, “science,” but it is the thing we commonly know as science; and our god, or rather goddess, is Nature.

It is not tolerant of other creeds. Its rituals of worship, things like rules for recycling, or buying electric cars, are mandatory. It is heavily state subsidized; tithing is not optional.

Unlike the Christian God, but like the other pagan gods, Nature is not well disposed towards man. Her temples, the nature preserves, often ban human beings. Mankind becomes, to quote more than one writer, “a cancer on the planet.” 

She is clearly and commonly personified, and specifically as feminine. She has all the characteristics familiar from Isis, Artemis, and Gaea, previous nature goddesses. She is aka “Mother Nature” or “Mother Earth.”

Gaea or "Mother Earth" at the Montreal Botanical Gardens

The religion also makes no allowance for ethics. Ethics are unnatural; “unscientific.” Instead, we have definite obligations to the goddess, on pain of provoking her wrath and retribution. 

The priesthood dresses in distinctive white smocks. At the same time, because the goddess is feminine, mortal women in her image seem to be given unlimited power over life and death. Child sacrifice, common in earlier pagan periods, has returned. There is no more value to human life, after all, than to that of an animal.

The field of psychology/psychiatry is in effect a permanent Inquisition, seeking out heresies.

This is not going well. This has reached its strongest expressions, so far, in Nazism and in Communism; but we would be naïve to think these cannot be bettered in future.

Pachamama

But, you might protest, science is simply truth. 

So it is; but scientism and nature worship have nothing to do with science.

Or with truth.

The Golden Calf

Xerxes wants to declare water sacred, because it is so important to life. “Water needs to be treated as sacred -- a gift, and a holy responsibility.”

I heard something similar from David Suzuki in a lecture once: he wanted us to worship the four classical elements, earth, air, fire, and water.

This idea does not appeal to me. If being important to our physical life is the standard of holiness, it would be just as proper to say that we ought to worship money. Does that sound right?

If not, is it because money is invented by man, and water comes from God (or nature)? Fine. Then at least, we ought to worship sex.

Or try this one. No form of life could survive without some form of waste elimination. These wastes then become the staff of life to other beings, which feed other beings, throughout the chain; the “great circle of life.” So surely by this same standard we should worship—er, excretions.

Does that sound right?

The first Bible reading at mass last Sunday seems to address the issue. It is Exodus 32, the story of the Hebrews casting a golden calf “to go before them”; against which Moses, in rage, broke the tablets of the law.

Why were the Hebrews wrong to bow before a golden calf? Because it was a graven image? But they have not yet heard that commandment. Moreover, the passage actually takes the trouble to note that the tablets of the law were also “graven” (Exodus 32:16): also graven images. Exodus is obviously contrasting the two, the tablets of the law and the golden calf, smashing one against the other, as opposite representations of the sacred. The tablets proper, the statue improper. And this should be evident without having read the tablets.

It is not because the statue is a graven image, then, but because the statue is an image from nature. The full commandment is “you shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath.” It is a prohibition specifically against worshipping nature, or any part of nature, as sacred.

And the passage seems to illustrate why. Moses burns the statue, spreads the ashes on the waters, and forces the Hebrews to drink it. This is striking, because the statue was made of gold. Gold does not burn, does not form ash, and does on float on water. In other words, this must be symbolic, metaphoric. The point is nature’s destructibility. Nature is all that passes into non-being. It burns, dissolves, is devoured, one way or another is ultimately gone. By smashing the tablets of the law, then getting a replacement set, Moses is demonstrating the perfect indestructability, by contrast, of spiritual things. Breaking the tablets cannot break the law. Only such eternal things are to be worshipped.

The moral law, the Good, is sacred. Cows aren’t. Even gold isn’t.

Worshipping water is the essential idolatry here condemned-- which is, in a word, materialism.

A Modest Proposal

Landscape, unidentified Canadian national park.

The standard line emerging on the left, and among the gilets jaunes of France, is that it is immoral to spend either public or private money rebuilding Notre Dame Cathedral while people anywhere are starving.

They would seem to have a point. Surely any money would be better spent on the basic material needs of those who are poor? 

Starving child. While rich foreigner can apparently afford a camera.

But let’s apply the principle consistently. Odd that it only comes up now, in the case of religious buildings. We should also by that logic sell off all our national, provincial or municipal parks. We can give the money to the poor, and the land can then be put into production. More food for everyone; but this is especially important to the poor and starving. We should also sell off any museums and public art galleries; these are obviously luxuries. Sell all the artifacts to rich collectors, as no doubt we would if we were shutting down Notre Dame, and give the money to the poor. After all, the poor cannot afford the admission to get in to the galleries and museums anyway.

You know the one place the poor can always get to see such things of beauty and significance, though? The one place they are free? Churches.

But the poor apparently do not need beauty in their lives, or meaning, or entertainment, or escape from the unhappy moment. They need only food and shelter.

There is another reason, too, why we should sell off all the parks. Many these days worship nature. They speak of “Gaea,” “the Earth our Mother,” “Evolution did this”; “Nature intended that”; and “Mother Nature.” I attended a live lecture once by David Suzuki; publicly funded with tax dollars, of course. He spent it arguing that nature was sacred, and declaring his lifelong devotion to the “sacred elements.” He meant the old Greek quaternity: earth, air, fire, water. Their purity must be preserved.

Mandala of the four classical elements.

 
Given, then, that nature is a religion now, it is obviously a violation of the separation of church and state to fund public parks. At least if we are not going to fund churches equally.

Just as there are still churches, without government support there no doubt would still be parks and museums. Indeed, on the model of churches, they could and should all be admission free. As it stands, most national parks are, unlike churches, simply not available to the poor.

But even this would not be enough for the left. They are objecting even and specifically to private funds being spent on Notre Dame.

So we must have no parks or museums either, even privately-funded, under any circumstances. We must surely also object to anyone spending money building amusement parks, cinemas, theatres, tourist hotels, or restaurants. All are purely luxury goods. People are starving!

Indeed, even so, there is still a better argument for spending on churches than on any of these other things. Not just that churches, unlike all these other luxury goods, are accessible to the poorest of the poor. Aside from that, it is, after all, at least possible that there is a world and a life after this present one. Those who build churches of course think so. And it is believed to be eternal, while this one is transitory. If so, not having enough money for food right now may be trivial in comparison to preparing for this forever. Since each individual eternal life saved is infinite in length, restoring Notre Dame might be of more value than an infinite number of relaxing weekends in nature here on earth.

One cannot under any generally accepted premise say the same for parks. Even the nature worshippers see no path blazed from them to eternal life.