Does Creationist Science Foster Anti-Ecological Practices?

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Where were the U.S. big four networks, during this past election?

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Licking the hand that feeds them.This message has been edited by contracycle, 12-28-2004 13:17 AM

Point taken, Quetzal. And certainly other animals have had negative impacts on their own sustainable environments. But I think the claim has merit as follows - if you look at a lot of ancient practicies, there is a sense of being in and of the natural world, part of it. And some of this is expressed in the idea of thanking an animal spirit for sacrificing itself to your cooking pot, albeit with much resistance.But the christian doctrine of the earth as mans property, given by god, denies this sense of relatedness and instead places humanity above the world, not in it. I think this does indeed translate into a contempt for the world of nature, seeing it universally as the "wilderness" hostile to humans and not something over which humanity has to exercise care. This can even be taken to a suicidal extent if we imagine that god only gave us enough material resources to last till judgement day anyway.

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I get the impression that you didn't read the Moyer's speech article I linked to in message 10. It contains more fundimentalist Christian material than perhaps I led you and others to think.

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?? I did read it, and nearly pointed out that Moyer stumbles on his own answer by referring to "moral imagination". As long as he treats the issue as a moral one he has conceded too much ground to the fundies. But thats largely irrelervant so I ommitted that remark. I also read the original Monbiot article to which he refers. In fact I've been sort of following the close relationship between the christian right, anti-environmentalism and sundry imperialists for some time now. Thats why I keep telling Amewricans they have to start acting on the basis of what their state actually does, not what it says, as you'll recall.

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If you look at the correlation between the arrival of H. sapiens to a region and the extinction of whole families of organisms during the Late Pleistocene, for example, you'll note that these ancient cultures certainly had a profound negative impact on the local fauna.

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Thats a straw man; whether or not they functionally caused extinctions is not germane to their psychology because they had no evidential feedback with which to assess their actions.What IS common in their psychology tho is a sense of being directly related to other animals, even BEING other animals in human form, or with other animals members of a broader community of creatures over which the gods preside.

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Both the megafaunal extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene and the current list of extinguished and/or critically endangered species from around the world IMO tend to render a connection between Christianity and extinction somewhat problematic. As I said before, human need, human greed, and human ignorance are the ultimate causes of what could be termed the Holocene Mass Extinction - not a particular religion. Unfortunately.

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Hmm, well, I can't say that I can cite a precise correlation between christinaity and a specific extinction, but I do think it is clear that where christinaity is dominant environmentalism takes a back seat. the history of the medieval church is quite s-pecific in this regard - after the collapse and depopulation of the Roman empire, the church conceived of pretty much the whole world - even populated areas - as the "wilderness" into which man was cast out from Eden. So they were quite instrumental in the recovery of the agricultural economy that this goes hand inglove with an ideology of hostility to nature, to seeing nature as an enemy, a trial to be overcome, not an ally in the process of living. And this attitude was well displayed during the period of European colonialism in which most colonists were unable to perceive nayure as anything other than something ugly to be defeated, tamed, and subordinated.IMO it was only through the works of thinkers like Rousseau and the later developement of environmentalism that has restored a now fairly widespread perception of ourselves as organisms on the planet like any other, rather than as the lords of creation bestriding our rightful demesne, and doing with it what we will without let or hindrance.