Appreciating Natural Gifts

Agriculture

Appreciating Agriculture

Food

Appreciating Food

Appreciating Energy

Appreciating Time

Government

Appreciating Government

Education

Appreciating Education

Religion

Appreciating Religion

Business

Appreciating Business

Noble, David F.  The Religion of Technology.  New York: Knopf 1997.  ISBN 0679425640, Pages 4 and 207

Some contemporary observers have argued, echoing generations of religious apologists, that the resurgence of religious expression testifies to the spiritual sterility of technological rationality, that religious belief is now being renewed as a necessary complement to instrumental reason because it provides the spiritual sustenance that technology lacks.  There is perhaps some truth to this proposition, but it still presupposes the mistaken assumption of a basic opposition between these two phenomena and ignores what they have in common.  For modern technology and modern faith are neither complements nor opposites, nor do they represent succeeding stages of human development.  They are merged, and always have been, the technological enterprise being, at the same time, an essentially religious endeavor.

This is not meant in a merely metaphorical sense, to suggest that technology is similar to religion in that it evokes religious emotions of omnipotence, devotion, and awe, or that it has become a new (secular) religion in and of itself, with its own clerical waste, arcane rituals, and articles of faith. 
Rather, it is meant literally and historically, to indicate that modern technology and religion have evolved together and that, as a result, the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief....

The expectation of ultimate salvation through technology, whatever the immediate human and social costs, has become the unspoken orthodoxy, reinforced by a market-induced enthusiasm for novelty and sanctioned by a millenarian yearning for new beginnings.  This popular faith, subliminally indulged and intensified by corporate, government, and media pitchmen, inspires an awed deference to the practitioners and their promises of deliverance while diverting attention from more urgent concerns.  Thus, unrestrained technological development is allowed to proceed apace, without serious scrutiny or oversight—without reason.  Pleas for some rationality, for reflection about pace and purpose, for sober assessment of costs and benefits—for evidence even of economic value, much less larger social gains—are dismissed as irrational.  From within the faith, any and all criticism appears irrelevent, and irreverent.

Cummings, E.E.  Complete Poems, 1904 - 1962. United States of America:  1991.  ISBN 0871401525, Page 566

XXVI
when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

Al Gedicks, The New Resource Wars. Boston: South End Press, 1993.  ISBN 0896084639, Page xi
In industrial society, “man’s dominion over nature” has preempted the perception of Natural Law as central.  Linear concepts of “progress” dominate this worldview.  From this perception of “process” as an essential component of societal development (defined as economic growth and technological advancement) comes the perception of the natural world as a wilderness in need of “cultivation” or “taming,” and of some peoples as being “primitive” while others are “civilized.”  This, of course, is the philosophical underpinning of colonialism and “conquest.”
This way of thinking is also present in scientific system of thought like “Darwinism,” as well as in social interpretations of human behavior such as “Manifest Destiny,” with its belief in some god-ordained right of some humans to dominate the earth.  These concepts are central to the legacy of the Columbus quincentennary and the present state of relations between native and settler in North America and elsewhere.  This conflict, in its present state, is also indicative of the scope of the problem—and the reality that a society based on conquest cannot survive.

Williams-Crawshay, Rupert.  The Comforts of Unreason. Connecticut:  1970. Pages 127-8

We have already seen how great are the mental comforts of believing in a Universal Good (suitable defined) and of constructing a moral code designed to attain that goal.  But these are as nothing to the physical comforts of inducing a sufficient number of other people to adopt the same code for themselves.  For then they will all believe that it is right to do the things you want them to do, and they will often do these things even when they are against their own interests.  This is, of course, quite understandable, since they have been persuaded (or taught) not to think things out for themselves, but to accept your code as their guide, a process which, when applied to the young, is generally called “building up character”.

The advantages of such a course are so overwhelming that, in fact, the history of the world provides a long series of examples of the way in which a small ruling class has controlled and restricted the education of the remaining majority so as to ensure its unthinking adoption of a prescribed code.  The fact that the ruling class has usually maintained its ascendancy for quite a long time, and has fought savagely when it was finally threatened, is, I think, evidence that this prescribed code must, as a rule, have been based on a conception of “the Good” which was in effect the “good” of the ruling class, however much it may have been said—and however much the ruling class may have deceived itself into believing—that it was the universal good.

Such a code will of course be immensely more efficient if it is incorporated into a religion.  For (a) it becomes more rigid; (b) the penalties for questioning it or disobeying it are increased by extension from this temporal world into the eternity of the next; (c) the ultimate Good is so firmly identified with superhuman interests that there is no chance of anyone’s suspecting that he is sacrificing his own interests for those of a small group of other men; (d) if the world is as God made it, the way it is arranged should not and cannot be altered and (e) men should not expect happiness in this world, but in the next.

Whatever other functions a religion may have, and however beneficent these may be, this short and incomplete list of typical religious tenets shows that it can be in practice most useful instrument in the hands of a ruling class.  And it seems most unlikely that any ruling class could be so foolish as not to take advantage of it.

Boulding, Kenneth E.  Economics as a Science. New York: McGraw Hill, 1970. ISBN 081917100X Pages 117-8

We are strongly imbued today with the view that science should be wertfrei [value-free], and we believe that science has achieved its triumph precisely because it has escaped the swaddling clothes of moral judgment; it has only been able to take off into the vast universe of the “is” by escaping the treacherous launching pad of the “ought.”  Even economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.  Who, indeed, would want to exchange the delicate rationality of the theory of an equilibrium price for the unoperational vaporings of a “just price” controversy?  In the battle between mechanism and moralism generally mechanism has won hands down.

Reynolds, Vernon., and Ralph Tanner.  The Social Ecology of Religion.  New York:  1983.  ISBN 0195069730 Page 30

Conclusion:  organized, institutionalized religion tends to fall in step with the secular world, to enjoy the fruits of power.  But what about the common man? He gets no share in the power of the state or its religion except what he can achieve by his own efforts.  How does the common man see religion in the modern world?  What is his relationship to the priesthood, the clergy, the temple, the mosque?  By and large, his contact with these people and buildings and the ideas they promote is strongest at particular life events, at birth and incorporation and marriage and death, and in the control of crises.  Religions take an interest in the life process of their adherents.  They try to control the way their adherents live their lives.  It is a kind of deal: religions say, “Live your life according to the faith, and you will get benefits, some in this life, some in the next.”  It is this extraordinary “deal” that we write about in this book—the various forms it takes in different faiths.  Even in the consumerist environment of the West, religion plays this part.  Churches are by no means empty in Western Europe; indeed, there appears to be a religious revival going on in the U.S. Midwest.  Baptisms, marriages, and funerals have not disappeared.  In the affluent West we may not need much from religion, but many people still in large measure accept that it has a role to play in their main life events.  American university students sometimes pray for the success of their basketball teams, and British football and rugby players can occasionally be seen to cross themselves as they run onto the field of play.  For the rest, we feel we can manage without religious supports, preferring material ones.

Page 31

The reverse is the case in many parts of the world.  Not everyone has the range of materialist accoutrements available to us in the West, though in most parts of the world’s cultures there is an eager desire to have more and more of them. 

This is not the place to digress into the attractions of consumerism, or the faults.  We simply need to note that among people all over the world there is a desire to Westernize the interface between themselves and the natural environment.  For the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari and Namibia until the midtwentieth century this desire was very limited.  Their technology consisted of digging sticks, spears, gourds, clothes, some simple jewelry, fire-making equipment, and temporary shelters.  For many rural Africans today, possessions are limited to a house, a hoe, some cooking pots, a bicycle, clothes, baskets, and gourds.  Those who can afford it also have a tape recorder or radio, but such is the poverty that in many cases batteries are not obtained.  In much of rural India, and a good many other countries, the situation is not far different.  The contrast with the West is enormous.  Yet, without patronizing, on such slender materialist means full lives are led.  The problem for such people is that their lack of physical resources limits their ability to respond to disease or accident or disaster of any kind, except my means which we think to be ineffective in scientific terms.  They are not, however, short of faith and hope and are well provided with traditional priests and traditional remedies.  The quality of life of the world’s poor is curiously undiminished by materialist deprivation, as visitors to poor countries are often surprised to discover.

Do consumerism and materialism diminish faith?  At root, materialism is about being able to resist the hardships and difficulties and dangers of the physical world.  The most important materialist possessions are those which enable a person to avoid hunger, thirst, disease, and injury and to maintain a comfortable edge on the fluctuations and occasional disasters of life.

Page 44

People in affluent populations who can use technology to solve their problems do not, it seems, need religious supports as much and can manage without them for the most part.  This very exception indicates what religion does for people in the rest of the world:  it meets their needs and helps them cope with life’s difficulties.

Page 45

Religions express the social and moral integration of individuals into their communities, inform them how to think correctly and behave properly, and give them support at times of crisis.  In all these ways, they fulfill the needs of individuals.  They perform social and psychological functions.  If we see human beings as intelligent creatures living in complex social groups, with long life spans that include a number of life crises, always in a world subject to natural disasters and diseases, we can explain why religions exist in terms of the social functions they perform in relation to the life cycle of individual persons, and between one person and another, always in the context of the prevailing features of the natural environment.

Page 49

Our approach relates the success of religions to their ability to meet human needs during the course of the life cycle, from conception to death.  Because of the universality of the life cycle, we expect that religions will survive the onslaughts of modernism, which worships at the altar of consumerism and materialism.  It seems unlikely that material things can perform the role religions perform all over the world.

Mark J. Plotkin,  Tales Of A Shaman’s Apprentice, New York: 1993  ISBN 0670831379, Pages 275, 276

My hammock was still swathed in mosquito netting, so I couldn’t see who was speaking.  “Ai, jako, kude wae!”  I replied.  “Yes.  brother, I am well.”

Suddenly the voice shifted into English.  “Good morning, my friend, how are you?” Koita!  I rolled out of bed to embrace him.  If I hadn’t heard his voice, I might not have recognized my old friend right away.  No red breech cloth, no beaded belt, no wristbands of sho-ro-sho-ro seeds.  In their place Koita wore a green and blue Hawaiian shirt, blue denim jeans, and black high-top sneakers.

“Where did you get all this?”  I asked.  “You look like a pananakiri.”  Koita’s broad smile faded.  “You mean you don’t like them?” I realized I had hurt his feelings and tried to recover.  “Well,” I stammered, “it’s just that .... just that you look very different, that’s all.  I hardly saw anyone wearing breechcloths yesterday, either.  What happened while I was gone?” “There have been some changes,” he said.  “The missionaries were here and they brought the clothes with them.  Also, the wildlife trader who used to give us flashlights and fishhooks for the animals we caught now gives us clothes.” “What else?”  I asked, at the same time dreading to hear the answer.  “Well, our friend Yaloefuh isn’t here anymore.  He was caught in the hammock of another man’s wife and the missionaries and the chief had him whipped in front of the whole village.  Then he was expelled and he went to live in the village in Brazil that you visited with Kamainja.” “He can never come back?” I asked incredulously. “Chief says no,” Koita replied.  “What about his wife and children?” “Oh, they are still here.”

Astonished by this piece of news, I wondered whether the beating given my friend was initiated by the missionaries or by the Indians themselves.  When some of the missionaries first came to Suriname, they insisted that each man could have only one wife.  This caused a great deal of heartache among the tribes that practiced polygamy because several old women were cut adrift without husband to care for them.  “Any other changes?”  I asked.  “Yes,” said Koita.  “The chief told us no more singing the old songs and dancing the old dances.  They are part of the old ways.”

Stephen L. Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute:  Transcending The Machines In Our Midst; Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly and Associates;  1995  ISBN 1565920856,  Page 85

Blindness at this point is exactly what allows the problems to detach themselves from us and run on according to their own logic.  They run on because we do not confront them within ourselves.  Where, on the other hand, we recognize ourselves in the world and then take responsibility for ourselves— well, I cannot say what additional doing will result (for the doing will be in freedom), but it will be a real doing, issuing from deep within, and therefore the only doing that counts.

Moore, Thomas, The Re-enchantment Of Everyday Life, New York, 1996: ISBN 0060172096, Page xiv
Many of our scientists, politicians, and business people are ardently at work building the cathedrals of their own religion of secularism, and in response, religion in its desperation is falling apart or becoming defensive and reactionary.

Yet for all the problems that science and technology present to a world in need of soul, they are not the cause of our disenchantment.  They are both full of magic, and I’m certain that magicians of the past would have readily appropriated many of the methods and discoveries of science along with the accompanying technologies.  The tendency of reason and science to take up too much room in modern life is just another symptom of disenchantment.  The root problem is not science.  It is religion.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education, Macmillan, 1916, Chapter Nine: “Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims”

The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim ) must be included within the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are inevitable and important, but nevertheless by-products. To set up an external aim strengthens by reaction the false conception of culture which identifies it with something purely "inner." And the idea of perfecting an "inner" personality is a sure sign of social divisions. What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with others -- which is not capable of free and full  communication. What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally -- and therefore exclusively. What one is as a person is what one is as associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse. This transcends both the efficiency which consists in supplying products to others and the culture which is an exclusive refinement and polish.

Thomas Naylor, William Willimon and Magdaleina Naylor.  The Search for Meaning. Nashville,  TN: Abington Press, 1994, Page 72

Capitalist America may be the most efficient and productive nation in the world, but it extracts a high human cost.  Conspicuous consumption is no longer a sign of our success, but rather a sign of our spiritual vacuum.

Moore, Thomas.  “The Butterfly and the Web.”  FORBES ASAP December 2, 1996.  Page 119

All my life I’ve read predictions about our future, how we will enjoy faster and more productive technologies.  But I don’t care if the next century brings skinnier and clearer televisions or wristwatches that can organize my life. 

Productivity is way down the list of my priorities, and anyway in the next century, I”d rather see peaceful neighborhoods, people working at what they love, beautiful towns and cities, the restoration of small farms, hospitals that treat you as a person and not as a pool of chemicals, children who are well fed and who are becoming citizens of compassion and humane intelligence, and animals, plants and fishes surviving in all their variety and quirky individuality to reflect a natural world that has a soul.

We have reduced the meaning of technology to machinery, but it has much deeper implications.  We could shape our lives with craft (techne), and have sacred technologies of ritual and prayer.  We could be expert in the crafts of raising children and making homes.  In the Middle Ages, the Latin word computo (compute) was used for “a reckoning together,” such as on holy days for festivals and rituals.  What we have secularized was once surrounded by a halo of holy imagination.  Once upon a time, computing and other forms of technology made life more sacred, not less.

Bork, Robert H,  Slouching Towards Gomorrah, New York:  1996  ISBN 0060391634, Page 9

A culture obsessed with technology will come to value personal convenience above almost all else, and ours does.  Religion tends to be strongest when life is hard, and the same may be said of morality and law.  A person whose main difficulty is not crop failure but video breakdown has less need of the consolations and promises of religion.

Novak, Michael.  "How Christianity Created Capitalism." The Wall Street Journal December 23, 1999

Capitalism, it's usually assumed, flowered around the same time as the Enlightenment -- the 18th century -- and, like the Enlightenment, entailed a diminution of organized religion.  In fact, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was the main locus for the first flowerings of Capitalism.   Max Weber (1864-1920) located the origin of capitalism in modern Protestant cities, but today's historians find capitalism much earlier than that in rural areas, where monasteries, especially those of the Cistercians, began to rationalize economic life.

It was the church more than any other agency, writes historian Randall Collins, that put in place what Weber called the pre-conditions of capitalism:  the rule of law and a bureaucracy for resolving disputes rationally; a specialized and mobile labor force; the institutional permanence that allows for transgenerational investment and sustained intellectual and physical efforts, together with the accumulation of long-term capital; and a zest for discovery, enterprise, wealth creation and new undertakings.

The 22 Minute Worship Service
http://theparson.net/minute.html

A new American Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida recently was featured in scores of newspapers and on the TV networks. This church has initiated a "Compact-Mini-22 Minute" worship service.

These are the elements of the service: (a) A slave bell from Tennessee tolls and (b) a cross-bearer proceeds unhurriedly to the altar, then an acolyte comes to light the candles. (c) The pastor announces Christ’s presence, (d) invites worshippers for a moment of silent prayer, and then (e) leads them in the Lord’s Prayer. (f) During the processional hymn (two verses only) a man comes to the front holding a Bible high above his head. (g) Scripture is read, and (h) an offering taken. (i) Special music takes only 2 1/2 minutes followed by (j) a six minute sermon. (k) Two verses of an invitational hymn, and (l) a benediction conclude the service.

Of course, I think there are even more possibilities for cuts. The service could be cut to 18 minutes by eliminating the processional and the tolling of the bell, by singing only one verse of each hymn, and by allowing people to give their offerings as they leave the service. The “Amen” on the final hymn could serve as the benediction.

While we are at it, I can think of some other things which will ease our hurried lives. We could eliminate one half of basketball and football games. The game is usually decided in the second half anyway. If they are decided in the first half, why play the second?

Why do baseball games have to be nine innings? Wouldn’t 3 innings make for a much snappier game?

Isn’t The New York Times far too big? Surely the really important news could be summarized in four pages a day.

Of course, if we made all these changes then we would have to decide what to do with all our extra time.

C. David Hess

Carl Gregg Doney, An Efficient Church, New York, 1907, Page 23

Ignorance of the proper and most efficient methods of work is also a portion of the heritage of religious organizations.  Omniscience could indeed perfectly plan for the new requirements, but finiteness moves with tentative and halting steps.  Judgments must be tested, revised, discarded; resources are to be perfected and directed.  The Christian army meets a foe whose maneuverings, strategies and weapons are new; it too must devise methods and equip itself for the modern form of warfare.

                               
Mason, Jim.  An Unnatural Order.  New York:  1993.  ISBN 0671769235
Page 31

Essentially, stewardship advocates are apologists for dominionism, for they argue that dominion does not mean what people have thought it has meant over the past several thousand years.  Now they tell us it was never supposed to have meant that humans should behave as ruthless lords over nature.  They argue that we are supposed to act as gentle, humane shepherds and gardeners tending, pruning, fertilizing, and cultivating the other life on earth.  All that would be very nice, but it is too late.  The dominionist dirty deeds have already been done.

In fact, dominion means just exactly what it has been taken to mean all these thousand of years: a license for boundless human exploitation of the rest of the living world.  The task today is to get away from it now that we see how it destroys not only the living world but our quality of life within it....

Page 34

Cicero’s summation of the Roman view is surprisingly modern:  “We are absolute master of what the earth produces.  We enjoy the mountains and the plains.  The rivers are ours.  We sow the seeds and plant the trees.  We fertilize the earth.  We stop, direct and turn the rivers; in short, by our hands and various operations in this world we endeavor to make it as it were another nature....”

Page 36

In his Novum Organum, Bacon bragged that “the legitimate goal of science is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.”  According to Lewis Mumford, “indeed the idea of riches and material abundance pervaded his thinking about science.”  These were rapidly becoming legitimate ends in European society as an increasingly urban and commercial world displaced the medieval emphasis on faith and church.  Bacon’s ideas succeeded because they paved a moral road for the materialism and obsessions with wealth that were to come with capitalism and industrial revolution.

Secularist and materialist as Bacon was, he gave up none of the human supremacy and dominionism expressed in Genesis.  If anything his human chauvinism was even more swaggering than the Hebrews when he wrote:  “Man, if we look for final causes, may be regarded as the centre of the world, insomuch that if man were taken away from the world, the rest would seem to be all astray, without aim or purpose.”  Such a supremacist view gave humans virtual ownership of nature with a secular kind of right to do anything they pleased with it—as a slaveowner might do with his slaves.  Indeed, Bacon had a master-slave model in mind when he wrote:  “I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.”

Page 119

Every few miles, the road is shrouded in a breath-stopping, rancid smell from some nearby animal factory.  It is a sickly, deathly smell (if you have been around healthy animals fed on hay or pasture you know the difference), like the smell of a concentration camp.  Which, of course, the factory farm quite literally is, because it concentrates a large number of animals indoors and feeds them a steady diet of grain concentrates (the agribusiness word for corn, soybeans, and the energy-rich seed parts of other plants). In addition, it is a factory in which energy and nutrients from the sun and soil are concentrated by animals and turned into meat, milk and eggs....

Page 161

Animal domestication has brought spiritual bankruptcy, if not poverty, to Western culture; it has spread,  unfortunately, along with Western influence....  Herders were the father and planters the mother of agrarian culture in the Middle East.  There, the herder culture’s aggressive, expansionist, make-centered ways were integral to the gestation and birth of agrarian society.  Its arrogance, toughness, and ruthlessness put a hard, cruel edge on Western agriculture and enabled it to dominate other societies a great distance away.  Western agri-culture was born domineering, and it grew up to swagger around the world conquering other lands and peoples.

This military edge, unfortunately, has often been mistaken for superiority.  While the other agri-centers also fostered values on controlling nature, they did a relatively better job of resolving the conflicts it stirred up within the human soul.  Most would agree that Hindus, Buddists, Jains, and Taoists of India and the Far East see human supremacy as much less certain, much less absolute than do Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  The latter come from the longest tradition of animal domestication from the source of it, in fact.  They “resolved” the conflicts by denying them.  Their theologies put forth the idea that human beings are separate and apart from the rest of the living world. 

Thus there is no kinship, no continuity; consequently, there is no conflict in appropriating other life for human benefit.  Indeed, it is according to God’s plan.  Therefore, exploitation is not just moral, it is godly.  What other agri-cultures see as slightly sinful, Westerners see as wholly righteous.

Page 162

And it must be emphasized that the hard, aggressive, domineering traits that characterize Western heroes (and thereby the Western value system) oppress a great many kinds of living beings.  Sheep and cattle were not the only victims, They were merely the first in a long line of manipulated lives that include many members of the human species as well.  When empathy for fellow beings was blocked, when kinship with them was denied by the Middle East’s animal-domesticating, agri-culture, all life, including the human variety, would suffer all the more.  After their God told them “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth,” they could more easily treat Others—human beings different from them—as beast.

Sagoff, Mark.  The Economy of the Earth.  New York: ISBN 0521341132, Pages 25-6

Adams asks in his essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin” how the products of modern industrial civilization will be compared with those of the religious culture of the Middle Ages.  If he could see the landfills and hazardous-waste facilities bordering the power stations and honeymoon hotels of Niagara Falls, he would know the answer.  He would understand what happens when efficiency replaces infinity as the central conception of value.  The dynamos at Niagara will not produce another Mont-Saint-Michel.  “All the steam in the world,” Adams writes, “could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.”

The shrine was empty when I visited it.  The cult of Our Lady of Fatima, I imagine, has few devotees.  The cult of allocative efficiency, however, has many.  Where some people see only environmental devastation, its devotees perceive welfare, utility, and the maximization of wealth.  They see the satisfaction of wants.  They envision the good life.

As I looked from the shrine over the smudged and ruined terrain, I thought of all the wants and needs that are satisfied in a landscape full of honeymoon cottages, commercial strips, and dumps for hazardous waste.  I hoped that Our Lady of Fatima, worker of miracles, might serve, at least for the moment, as the patroness of cost-benefit analysis.  I thought of the miracle of perfect markets.  The prospect, however, looked only darker in that light.

Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics, Crown Publishers, New York 1991, Page 266

Our drive to become ever more efficient is bound up with our yearning to be like the gods—a prime force, autonomous, all-powerful, and in control.  Lest there be any nagging doubt on this score, consider how pervasive and coveted this single value has become.  The very idea of challenging the merits of efficiency, or rejecting it outright as a value, seems wildly heretical, if not completely blasphemous.