Monday, August 4, 2014

Which god do you love more, Mammon or Mother Nature?

Mary Pipher writes in her book, The Green Boat, on page 7, "Then, in President Obama's post reelection speech, he told listeners, 'We want out children to live in an America that isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.' This breaking of the silence surrounding global climate change give me hope that, at last, we as a society might have a conversation about the fate of our beloved planet. We cannot solve a problem we won't discuss. But now that the spell of silence has been broken, perhaps we can stay awake and go to work."

It's not like President Obama let the cat out the bag. Climate warming has been well known for a decade. What's new is not the information, but that someone with power like the President of the United States would acknowledge the truth.

Pipher's point that if you can't name it, you can't manage it, is a good one. We are, and can be, easily victimized by forces we don't understand. We understand the phenomenon of climate change very well, at the least the scientific community does. The science is clear. What is questionable are our values and ethics. Ethical responsibility lags far behind scientific knowledge which might leave an observer of this fact to conclude that scientific institutions are doing their job, but religious institutions aren't. Mammon, our contemporary god, has far exceeded its influence on the American public than Mother Nature.

Which god does America love more? Mammon hands down. To this idol of American worship, the religious institutions of the country have not only acquiesced, but supported, with the so called "gospel of prosperity". This worship of this false god, Mammon, has grown increasingly untenable with climate change, and Mother Nature will hold her exceptional species accountable for their destruction of Her other beloved species up to and including the destruction of that exceptional species itself if it does not change its ways of living on its evolutionary trajectory.

Unitarian Universalism pays lip service to Mother Nature in its seventh principle, respect for the interdependent web, but UUs continue to worship Mammon as well, and its hard to tell which god they love more if one is to watch their behavior. UUs certainly are not the Amish and Mennonite who have been clear in their practice that Mother Nature is a priority for them. Does Unitarian Universalism have something to offer the inhabitants of the Green Boat? It appears that they do, but it will have to be preached and practiced more vigorously, if what UUs say is to be taken seriously by the rest of the world.

1 comment:

  1. You might want to check out the UUA's green sanctuary program.

    http://www.uua.org/environment/sanctuary/

    ReplyDelete

Print Friendly and PDF