Midweek Faith Lift
May 2, 2018
One With the Earth
Clark Ford, guest speaker
· Crosby Stills and Nash sang “We are Stardust…”
· “…We are Golden…”
· “…And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden…”
For almost the entire history of human beings, we have not had the tools to really explore who we are or where we came from, until now. We didn’t have Anthropology, Astrophysics, Evolutionary Biology, or even Ecology. Instead, we had mythology which was comforting, but often self-serving and entirely misinformed.
· “We are Stardust…” Literally. Carl Sagen said: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
· It took a long time for our solar system to coalesce from stardust
· But that is what the earth is made of: Atoms and molecules forged by the furnaces in the center of countless stars
· And we are made of the earth. It took a long time for our earth to cool, and for the oceans to form. It was in the oceans that life began
· Eventually plants produced enlough oxygen for the atmosphere to support animals, and animal evolution began. This process took hundreds of millions of years.
· Human beings did not just spring into being fully formed either, but evolved from closely related primates. Anthropologists point out that we are so closely related to Chimpanzees, that an objective scientist from another planet would be forced to conclude that humans and chimpanzees are in the same genus. We would be the third chimpanzee species!
· Humans arose in Africa, and with their big brains became proficient with tools, and making fire.
· For most of the nearly million years of human existence, we have lived as hunters and gatherers, close to nature. One with nature.
· Hunters and gatherers understood sex produced babies, and valued women because they gave birth to the next generation allowing the tribe to live and grow.
· While men often specialized in defense and hunting big game, women did everything else: raised children, made camp, and gathered or hunted the majority of the food that was eaten.
· Survival was crucial, and lifespans were short. Fertility and female pregnancy was often worshipped.
· Humans with their bigger brains and expanded consciousness needed cosmological explanations for how they got there and who they were. In many societies it made sense that since women give birth to babies, that a female deity, or goddess, must have given birth to the world. Later, when agriculture was adopted, ancients believed that the goddess gave birth to agriculture.
· About 8,000 BC the first crops and animals were domesticated and the Agricultural Revolution was born.
· Now humans would stay put, grow as much food as they could, and increase their population size.
· Eventually as populations grew, agricultural societies would have to attack their neighbors to get more land to grow more food. We tend to think of Agriculture as peaceful, but it is anything but peaceful in history. This land of Iowa is itself conquered land.
· Nobody wants to think badly of themselves, so wars of conquest were justified by religion.
· To be successful in war you needed war gods. Although some goddesses like Athena were turned into goddesses of war, war gods were generally male.
· By 3,000 BC, agricultural civilization was blooming in Sumeria and Egypt. There were also constant wars between different competing city states.
· The Hebrew God, Yaweh, who promised the Hebrew people land, also led them to victory in war. Yaweh was carried into battle inside the Arc of the covenant.
· The Hebrew God was, of course, male, and created Adam to propegate the earth. Unlike many other cultures, the Hebrews did not honor any goddesses, and were completely patriarchal. Thus women were not only second class citizens, but deprived of any kind of female deity to protect them.
· Women were an afterthought and a scapegoat in the Hebrew creation myth, created from Adam and designed to be his companion. Nature was created for humans to use, and men were considered superior to both women and the natural world. Humans were far from being natural themselves. They were special, separate, created with a divine spark that put them above and not part of nature.
· Ironically, the Garden of Eden myth was a kind of depiction of hunter-gathering life, although the Hebrew’s ancestors had not been hunters and gatherers for thousands of years when the Torah was written. Not satisfied with letting their creator feed and clothe them like the other animals, humans ate from the tree of knowledge, and were cast out of the garden of Eden and condemned to a life of agriculture.
· Fast forward 1500 years and the Hebrew religion has spread into Europe via Roman conquest. Fast forward another 1500 years to the present day, and European culture has spread to the New World via European conquest. Humanity now numbers over 7 billion. Humans have dominated the earth, the oceans, and the atmosphere, destroying and polluting wherever we have gone.
· We have a choice: continue to believe that we are special, that our God has given us the earth to dominate and use; or acknowledge that we are part of nature, a nature that God created and that we, in our arrogance are trashing.
· Anthropocentrism is the idea that all morality revolves around humans. “Human Centered.” Thus only humans count morally (or have moral standing), and nature can be used freely (because it has only instrumental value). You can see how this idea was so appealing to ancient humans who thought that the earth was at the center of the universe, and humans were put on earth by their God to be the most important thing on earth. The sciences of Astrophysics, Anthropology, Evolutionary Biology, and Ecology have whittled away at this ethic of human arrogance and ignorance. Perhaps that is one reason science is under attack in our society.
· Native Americans had a different view of nature. Here is what Chief Sitting Bull said in 1877. It’s very poetic:
“Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!
Every seed has awakened and so has all animal life.
It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land…
“Yet hear me, my people, we have now to deal with another race –
small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them …
“They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own, and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse.
They threaten to take [the land] away from us. My brothers, shall we submit, or shall we say to them: "First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland."
· For millions of years consciousness has evolved slowly, focused on survival and reproduction. We now can ask cosmic questions that no other life form on our planet has yet asked. We have a conscious spirituality.
· We have a choice at how we look at the natural world. We can see ourselves as lord and master of the earth, ruled over by a powerful warlord God; or we can see ourselves as part of nature, one with the earth. This is a question about who our God is. Is our God a God of power-over, of dominance and exploitation, and conquest; or a God of love, beauty, and honoring all creatures great and small?
· If we are one with the earth, we will be motivated to take care of all of nature. We would see all creatures great and small as our brothers.
· If we are one with the earth, we can view the earth as our mother: part of Mother Father God. That which birthed us and continues to nurture us. We needn’t look to the heavens to understand God. God is in us and all around us. We are in God and we are of God. We are in the world and of the world.
· If we are one with the earth, we are part of the tree of life itself, and we can learn about God no matter which direction we look: up or down, inside or out. It’s all God.
· We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. The ancient Hebrew patriarchs are probably rolling over in their graves right about now. So be it!
Blessings on the Path and gratitude to Clark!
Rev. Deb