In article <K0B49v.6Ho@pinkrose.net.dhis.org>, B'ichela wrote:
> In article <1fad6515-f722-4fcb-b046-fdcc2c434e2e@y18g2000pre.googlegroups.com>, Wade wrote:
>> This is more like "What Is Islam?" http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...02797772997781
>>
>> Peace is where Islam is not
> Why haven't I seen any Gaian or Wiccan mentioned? I am a Gaian
> btw. Find out more about Gaia, Gaiaism at http://www.gaia.org. A true
> Gaian is oriented towards peace with all life and Gaia.
>
Just an update. While
http://www.gaia.org is a good site.
http://www.templegaia.org is even better. here is a short excertp on
the spritual implications. I am sending this out to counter the
Islamist views. You can actually discuss this at my newsserver
nntp://pinkrose.dhis.org. There I run a free open Gaiaism forum. both
for Gaia.neopagan and gaia.christian.
Spiritual Implications
Spiritual implications follow from Gaiaist thought:
1) Whatever is sacred in life cannot be separated out from the
whole of existence. As life cannot be divorced from the environment
that supports it, so we cannot reduce sacred to any one manifestation
of being, but must extend sacredness to the whole dynamic system of
relationships between Gaias life. Gaia, like spirituality, is an
emergent phenomenon, one that is comprehensible intuitively but
difficult or impossible to analyze by reduction.
2) If we accept that our species evolved in the same way as every
other species, we cannot assume that we were created at a particular
moment in time outside the processes of evolution. Nor can we assert
that we alone know, through some divine revelation, how our species
began or what will happen to us at the end of time. Practically, we
cannot assume that the Earth and its resources evolved and now exist
solely for our use.
Gaiaism therefore raises critical oppositions to the anthropocentrism
of major Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Bah'i)
doctrines where they infer that:
1) The Earth was created solely for the sake of humans, and that
its creatures and resources exist primarily for human exploitation.
2) The revelation of God is fully contained in human words
addressed to and historically recorded by humans.
3) Death was brought into the world as punishment for one man's
sin rather than being an evolutionary necessity.
Gaiaism also puts in question the traditionally vertical nature of
hierarchical Abrahamic imagery. This places a god above angels, men,
and women in descending order of value and importance, so that the
Earth and its creatures are presumed created in a position of
subservience to human beings because they are of less value to the
god.
The practical effects of claims to human exceptionalism are now
evident in the exploitation through industrialization and
technologization of the Earth's resources. The scale of human
extraction and consequent waste, far outstrip that of natural
replacement or disposal. Conversely the Gaiaist relational
understanding of human interactions with the environment, limits human
rights by constraining them to match those of our planetary partners.
The dominant free-market model of development and continuing growth
presupposes that the resources needed to sustain it will be available,
and that thanks to science and technology, together with the spread
and improvement of education, we shall be able to leave a better
global situation than the one we inherited. The presupposition behind
this expectation is, of course, that the global biophysical
environment will sustain this growth. Numerous research projects into
the health of that environment, however, show precisely the opposite.
Human interdependence within Gaia means that we are all in some way
implicated in, and diminished by, the contemporary destruction of
ancient ecology, and discrimination between human groups.
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B'ichela
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