With all the discussion of carbon footprints and the human impact on our planet, has environmentalism become the new paganism of the 21st Century?
Steven Robinson
Had
Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would
know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a
pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel
a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.
But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.
Because
when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she
was helping to save the planet. At the age of 27 this young woman at
the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the
planet”. Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that
never was, her boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a
congratulations card. While some might think it strange to celebrate the
reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her
decision with an almost religious zeal.
“Having
children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at
the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35. “Every person who is born
uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees
and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and
adds to the problem of over-population.”
While
most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature,
Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.
“The
only person who understood how I felt was my first husband, who didn’t
want children either. We both passionately wanted to save the planet -
not produce a new life which would only add to the problem.”
But when she was 25, disaster struck.
“I
discovered that despite taking the Pill, I’d accidentally fallen
pregnant by my boyfriend. I was horrified. I knew straight away there
was no option of having the baby. I went to my doctor about having a
termination, and asked if I could be sterilised at the same time. I
didn’t like having a termination, but it would have been immoral to give
birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the
world. I’ve never felt a twinge of guilt about what I did, and have
honestly never wondered what might have been.”
“I’ve
never doubted that I made the right decision. Ed and I married in
September 2002, and have a much nicer lifestyle as a result of not
having children. We love walking and hiking, and we often go away for
weekends. Every year, we also take a nice holiday - we’ve just come back
from South Africa. We feel we can have one long-haul flight a year, as
we are vegan and childless, thereby greatly reducing our carbon
footprint and combating over-population.”
 |
| "Mother Earth" (from here) |
Meet Sarah and Mark
Most
young girls dream of marriage and babies. But Sarah dreamed of helping
the environment - and as she agonised over the perils of climate
change, the loss of animal species and destruction of wilderness, she
came to the extraordinary decision never to have a child.
“I
realised then that a baby would pollute the planet - and that never
having a child was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do.”
Mark
adds: “Sarah and I live as green a life a possible. We don’t have a
car, cycle everywhere instead, and we never fly. We recycle, use
low-energy light bulbs and eat only organic, locally produced food. In
short, we do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint. But all
this would be undone if we had a child. That’s why I had a vasectomy. It
would be morally wrong for me to add to climate change and the
destruction of Earth. Sarah and I don’t need children to feel complete.
What makes us happy is knowing that we are doing our bit to save our
precious planet.”
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
It
seems for many, the Earth has become the god of the new millennium,
and if I judged the nature of the god by the devotional practices of
some of its worshippers, I doubt that I would be inclined to convert to
the religion of ecology. These people may be fringe, but the fringe
is getting longer and longer and the fabric is getting smaller and
smaller.
While
these kinds of folks would reject religion and dogma, their devotion
to the earth is indeed a religious devotion very similar to the ancient
pagans: Toni sacrifices her first born child but then eats vegan in
order to not kill animals to “save” the Earth-god. They mutilate their
bodies so they won’t offend the earth by “adding to its problems”.
But in return for these sacrifices of human flesh and blood, the
Earth-god rewards them with a “much nicer lifestyle”. And in the end if
your meet your quota of abstinence from carbon and balance your
greenhouse gasses books, you get to go on a nice vacation. You get to
travel in a vehicle that burns thousands of gallons of fossil fuel and
God knows what the manufacturing process took out of the earth and put
into the atmosphere. Then you get to feast at a fancy hotel built and
staffed by parasites and “problems” begotten by irreligious reproducers,
that is taking up land formerly occupied by trees and is probably a
huge gaudy pimple on the face of the Earth god.
 |
| From here |
Apparently
even the eco-fundamentalists has a version of the prosperity gospel…
we “serve the earth god”, name it and don’t claim it, and you get nice
stuff and exotic vacations. It seems that all false religions share a
common delusion about their gods. It is interesting that in our innate
religiousness, human beings use much the same concepts, rituals, and
language to define our relationship to whatever gods we are trying to
appease.
The
fuzzy gods of the modern intellectual’s neo-pagan spirituality are
really no different than the gods of superstitious primitives or even
the Christian God that they sneer at condescendingly. The pagans
burned their virgins to keep the volcano from devouring the village,
they are told the Christian God sacrificed His own son to appease his
own wrath against the sinner, and this kind of religiosity is primitive,
ignorant and offensive. But the irony is that these modern
enlightened intellectuals also embrace sacrificing their children for
the sake of pleasing the god of trees and icebergs and to keep the
earth from a murderous upheaval that will smite the village. For them,
if you balance out your carbon sins then your footprint will be in the
book of life. The modern person is not like the primitive though. He
does not draw pictures of his religion with burnt sticks on cave walls,
they blog about in sophisticated tones, with book, chapter and verse
from inerrant science. They percieve themselves like all religious
zealots do, as beacons of light from a spiritual and moral high ground,
and as self sacrificing martyrs for the sake of the good of the
incandescently unenlightened.
So, for the people like Toni and Ed the true bottom line is that the earth has become for them a pagan deity appeased by the blood of innocents, and they live in fear that if we add to its problems and don’t please it, it will kill us with weather changes and by withholding its natural resources from human beings. The irony is they, like all other religions, including science, believe the earth itself yielded human beings somehow (unless they believe we were dropped onto it by space aliens). The question is, how is it that humanity now regards itself as a pollution, a parasite, a cancerous growth, a disease to be cured, a wart to be burned off the pristine face of the earth from whence it came? The ground is considered more sacred than the human beings that were formed from it. A clod of dirt and a seed is more holy than a human seedling that is being nourished in a human womb. But the eco-pagans are inconsistent: they are self defined as worth less than the dirt, but in their human hubris they are now the dirt’s savior, they are saving their own god by sacrificing their humanity on its altar. So, who is the true god and who is the true savior here?
So, for the people like Toni and Ed the true bottom line is that the earth has become for them a pagan deity appeased by the blood of innocents, and they live in fear that if we add to its problems and don’t please it, it will kill us with weather changes and by withholding its natural resources from human beings. The irony is they, like all other religions, including science, believe the earth itself yielded human beings somehow (unless they believe we were dropped onto it by space aliens). The question is, how is it that humanity now regards itself as a pollution, a parasite, a cancerous growth, a disease to be cured, a wart to be burned off the pristine face of the earth from whence it came? The ground is considered more sacred than the human beings that were formed from it. A clod of dirt and a seed is more holy than a human seedling that is being nourished in a human womb. But the eco-pagans are inconsistent: they are self defined as worth less than the dirt, but in their human hubris they are now the dirt’s savior, they are saving their own god by sacrificing their humanity on its altar. So, who is the true god and who is the true savior here?
St. Paul of Obnora, Russia - a tree dweller (click here): "Someone visited Saint Paul of Obnaras
(Obnora) who lived in a remote area of the Russian forests. When he saw him he
became witness to the following: A great number of birds surrounded
the Saint. The smaller ones even climbed in his shoulders and head and
he would feed them with his hands. Close to him was a bear that waited
to be fed. Foxes, hares and other animals would mingle without any
aggression between them. It was a wonderful picture of the first
created innocent Adam in the garden of Eden" (from here).
I’ve
been alive long enough to remember being told the earth would end due
to overpopulation, depletion of coal and oil, lack of enough land to
farm to feed everyone in the United States much less the world, nuclear
winter, an immanent ice age, global warming and now “climate change”.
These issues seem to matter more to the secular spiritual person more
than it does to most Christians it seems, and to complicate matters the
issues also seem to divide along political party lines. The bloated
consumer, whether it is a Christian or not, and the eco fundamentalist
earth worshippers both hold the same error, they are flip sides of a
same coin: They both stand in relation to creation as animals: one
mindlessly takes pleasure from the earth being driven by greedy
passions, the other regards himself to be utterly indistinguishable
from the earth in the end. To both, the measure of a human being is
not being material with a soul and spirit, but merely a carbon
footprint and litres of greenhouse gasses emitted due to consumption.
But,
even if someone believes that human beings are no more important than a
rock or a tree, there is still a common concept between the pagan and
Christian of the need for the “salvation” of the material world. And,
if something needs saving, then it must have a state to which it ought
to return before it fell from its original perfection. So, the
problem with the religion of ecology is it has no cohesive theology or
cosmology of a perfect original state or stage of being, nor of a
“fall”, nor of what a perfect earth would look like with or without
human beings. Without these things defined it is meaningless to discuss
whether the earth can or should either save us or kill us, or how or
should we save the earth. For both the Christian and the atheist, two
concepts are clear: Eden, or a pristine primal state of the earth did
not save humanity in the beginning, and in some way or another only
transformed human beings will save it in the end. This part we all have
right, but what all that means
and how to accomplish it is the issue we have to wrestle with.
and how to accomplish it is the issue we have to wrestle with.
 |
Holy New Martyr Peter of Krutitsa (1863-1937 - click here) |
One
of the problems for the eco-religion is that there is no overarching
metaphysical or theological definition that encompasses ALL
materiality, including earth, animals and humans. We are stuck viewing
ecology through the lens of dialectic, a philosophy of opposition, which
boils down to: either the earth or human beings, when in fact ecology
properly understood is the science and ultimately the metaphysical
vision of the inter relatedness of all things, it is indeed a both/and.
Ultimately, the question for the Christian and the environmentalist is
the same: what is the proper and balanced relationship of the human
being to the earth? Both are really asking the same question, “What is
the earth for and how can it be saved from the human race’s sins?”
It is here that Orthodox Christianity lifts the discussion out of the mire of pagan concepts. It raises both the earth and humanity to their proper dignity as the sacramental presence of their Creator. It views creation as the sacred means of the expression of love, thanksgiving and communion between both humans and God. Environmental concerns should matter to the Christian because we are not materialists, but we are material beings in the image of a Spiritual God who became material and subdued and consumed creation along side us. As sacramentalists, we cannot view the world as merely an endlessly self regenerating consumable that exists solely for the sake of our pleasures. Such blessed gifts are to be regarded as sacred and handled as such because God is present in them.
It is here that Orthodox Christianity lifts the discussion out of the mire of pagan concepts. It raises both the earth and humanity to their proper dignity as the sacramental presence of their Creator. It views creation as the sacred means of the expression of love, thanksgiving and communion between both humans and God. Environmental concerns should matter to the Christian because we are not materialists, but we are material beings in the image of a Spiritual God who became material and subdued and consumed creation along side us. As sacramentalists, we cannot view the world as merely an endlessly self regenerating consumable that exists solely for the sake of our pleasures. Such blessed gifts are to be regarded as sacred and handled as such because God is present in them.
Where
the ecologist and the Orthodox Christian agree is that human beings,
and even Christians, have ceased to subdue the earth carefully and to
be wise stewards instead of selfish consumers of it. We have lost the
reverence of the earth as “our mother” to whom we will return as the
Hypokoae of Matins in the 8th tone calls it. We have failed to live up
to our sacramental nature and are not sharers of creation in love, but
we hoard it to ourselves for our own greedy pleasures. God as our
creator does not need to be appeased by sacrifice, the human being is
given a gift and we offer it back to our Creator and to each other in
love, not fear of wrath and an apocalyptic doom. The ecologist and
Orthodox Christian agree that the human being is indeed taken from the
dirt of the earth and thus shares in the nature of the earth itself.
But Christianity says he also is given the breath of God who created the
very dirt from whence he came, and so he shares in the nature of the
spiritual and is given dominion over the dirt, but not for gluttonous
consumption but as a means of expressing love in the image of the one
who created all things out of love.
 |
| One of the Elder Paisios' snakes |
The reality is, the eco religion has not forged any new dogmas about the human being and the earth. For all of the science and technology exoskeleton holding it up, it is as old as the hills dotted with drawings scratched on cave walls with burnt sticks. The core is still the same as the one the prophets of Israel spoke to over 2600 years ago when they called Israel to reclaim the proper relationship of human beings to the earth and our creator:
Habbakuk and Jeremiah say:
Woe to him who says to a piece of wood, ‘Awake!’ To a mute stone, ‘Arise!’
Who says to a tree, ‘You are my father,’ And to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’?
They have turned their back to Me… (Jeremiah 2:27)
Turn
back to the God of the dirt from whence you were formed. And then in
love, turn to the earth knowing who you truly are. Love your Creator,
and receive His creation in humble gratitude, offering it up to all as a
gift of communion with the very cosmos.
Nature is not God
A study by Th. I. Riginiotis
Translation A. N.
Icon from here
In our day
and age there is a noticeable increase in people who have been unearthing from
oblivion and reliving the worship of ‘gods’ belonging to ancient pagan
religions. This appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, which is intensifying as
contemporary peoples seek their cultural roots, and while western peoples are
seeing that they can now shake off the oppressive and imperialist versions of
Christianity which took shape in the West during the past thousand years:
Catholicism and Protestantism.
These
contemporary worshippers often admit that they don’t really believe in the
existence of ancient ‘gods’, but are attracted by “what is represented” by
those gods and the myths that speak of them – that is, “the powers of nature
and the universe”, inner peace and harmony of all creatures.
Thus we
observe even rituals for worshipping the Sun, the Moon, Nature, life etc., as
well as invocations to the universe and its supposed “powers”. This perception – which is now a strong
current – also possesses a whole lot of artistic creations in every form of the
arts.
Modern man
believes that this is the way of returning to his roots and that such acts have
something beautiful, romantic and philosophical.
However we
must bear in mind that the ancient Greek philosophers did not maintain that
Nature, Earth or the universe are gods; on the contrary, they rejected these
religious ideas – at times by imposing severe critique on the ancient religion
(as for example Xenophanes of Kolophon had done), or even on the major Hellene
poets (as Plato had done).
The
viewpoint of the philosophers on divinity seemed to be closer to the Christian
viewpoint: that there is only one God, who is transcendental, who had created
everything and does not in the least resemble humankind or any other creatures.
Ancient
peoples sincerely believed that Nature, the Earth, the Universe – and
everything contained therein – were in fact divinities. They actually
worshipped them. Not symbolically or “philosophically”. In fact, very often (in a frightening
frequency) they also sacrificed living victims in order to worship those
so-called “gods”: be they animal or human sacrificial victims [1].
Along with
the aforementioned, they also believed in Fate as an omnipotent divinity, in
Astrology, in sorcery, in divination and the occult arts.
 |
| St. Seraphim of Sarov |
During the
Hellenic-Roman era Christianity was the voice of logic, which had spoken up
against the deification of Nature, thus opening the way to scientific progress [2]);
it had also spoken up against people’s fear of Fate and Sorcery, as well as
against the bloodthirsty cults of the pagan “gods”.
When
Christians had stated that only the One, True God is deserving of worship and
that the Earth, the heavenly bodies etc should not be deified, they weren’t
speaking theoretically, nor were they replacing the worship of nonexistent
“gods” with the worship of another, equally nonexistent divinity.
Christian
saints have seen – and still see – the divine Light with their own eyes; they merge
with it and they too become Light, because Christianity (the ancient, authentic
form: the Orthodox Church [3]) is the path to the moral and
spiritual perfection of man, which leads to his union with the true God (the
Triunal God, the God of Love) and with all other beings. This is not a symbolic worship comprised of
personified, abstract meanings; it is an actual union of man and God –
something that makes man a universal being.
Thousands of orthodox Christians of every era had attained – and continue
to attain – that state, and not merely in the afterlife, but even while they
were still living here.
 |
| Icon from here |
We would
therefore ask, from the heart, our fellow-men who are under the impression that
by returning to the worship of symbolic gods, they are taking a step towards
wisdom or self-awareness or harmony with the world’s creatures, to come and
meet the true path that leads to all those things: the orthodox Christian path.
Amid the
orthodox peoples – as elsewhere – there are people of every moral stage; however,
the ones who can show the way are our holy teachers (and teachers of mankind).
They are the ones who embrace everything in Creation and become one with them.
Notes
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice. See also: The god Called "Earth".
[2] In the area of scientific knowledge, Christians were a continuation of the ancient Greeks, which is why we have very many saints who are doctors, mathematicians, philosophers etc. - having authored works of immense scientific value for their time, and equally valuable for the history of science in our time (see for example here). However, we must not confuse the holy teachers of the ancient Church and of Orthodoxy with the cruel stance of the Roman Catholics of the Mediaeval Age (the "Catholic Church"), who had amassed immense power and had often impeded scientific progress. This stance, and the teaching from which it had originated, constitues a heresy according to Orthodox criteria.
[3] On identifying the Orthodox Church with the ancient, authentic Church that Jesus Christ had founded, browse (among many other articles) here: A Journey to the Ancient Church: Evangelicals Discovering Orthodox Christianity and here: The Orthodox New Martyr of Mexico: Paul de Ballester-Convallier.
Click here:
Orthodoxy's Worship: The Sanctification of the Entire World
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