Mother Earth can still be a God Concept

Church this past Sunday was a tiny bit dreadful. The week before it was amazing. The theme then was on humanist spirituality. This week the theme was earth-centered spirituality. To be fair, it was still refreshing in the sense that these folks openly admitted that their environmentalism is a religion. But some aspects about it showed that their version of it (or at least, the version presented by the lady who conducted the service) is a religion more on the level of traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, than on the level of, say, Taoism or Jainism.

The lady conducting the service read a creation story that was written by a Unitarian Universalist. It was about the Goddess who decided to take care of her loneliness by curling up into a ball and spinning around really fast, forming mountains with the ridges of her spine and lakes with her breasts, and giving birth to all manner of plants and creeping things from her womb, and making 8 humans, 4 male and 4 female, a white male and female, a yellow male and female, a brown male and female, and a black male and female created she them, and she called them good, and they called her Mother.

I've always been perfectly comfortable accepting the common theory that white people are a genetic accident. I've known since I was a very small kid that the paintings of a white Adam and Eve were a bit fanciful. A brown Adam and Eve made much more sense to me. I know that the writer of this Mother Earth creation story wanted to be inclusive - to show that every phenotype is within the Divine plan - but it really looks like it's suggesting that racial categories are Divine constructs and not social constructs. (There's a very thin line between saying that everyone should be allowed a place and saying that everyone has their place.)

But the predestination of race isn't my main beef. My main beef against this creation story is that it has the very same problem that almost every theistic religion has. It ascribes onto humans a raison d'etre that they did not choose. According to this story, we are essentially bi-pedal pets that are supposed to keep someone else company.

I think a lot of theistic creation stories have the same problem - they point at some relationship in some purported origin and say that that relationship is the rightful one. Connected to this is the Divine Command problem. In these stories, the rightful relationship is the one that was determined by whoever the Divine entity is.

Theism can be used to prop up all sorts of hegemonic pyramids. Most of us know that associating the Divine with monarchy (calling God a King, painting Him sitting on a thrown, etc.) is a justification for all sorts of domination that occurs within monarchical political structures. I think the same thing happens when the Divine is associated with Nature. I'm speaking, of course, about religious justifications for the hegemonic system of animal predation.

The lady leading the service did some readings from a book that came out just recently. One of the scenes in this book was the author's observations of a leatherback turtle swimming along with jellyfish tentacles dangling from its mouth like noodles. She kept referring to its prey as "its lunch", as if killing another sentient being to eat it is just another one of those simple pleasures we're all entitled to.

Animals killing and eating other animals is something you have to smile on if you worship Nature. I think this is a problem for people who believe that the inherent worth and dignity of every being implies that the sentient ones are entitled to be left to enjoy their own lives.

People who worship Nature and oppose unjust domination seem to ignore that there is such a thing as Sin Nature. They seem oblivious to the fact that cruel domination is written into the very mechanisms that the ecosystem runs on.

Those who do recognize that cruelty is programmed into the natural order say that they themselves wouldn't engage in the predation of animals. But the predation of animals by other animals? Well that's the will of Our Mother.