pantheism environmentalism apr susan harwood kaczmarczik writes to all we suspect that s because one party to the environmental dispute thinks the earth is sanctified it s clear that much of the environmentalist energy is derived from what has been called the religious left a secular or even pagan fanaticism that now worships such gods as nature and gender with a reverence formerly accorded real religions emphasis mine shk first of all secular and pagan are not synonyms pagan which is shk derived from the latin paganus means of the country it is in shk fact a cognate with the italian paisano which means peasant shk paganism among other things includes a reverence for the planet and shk all life on the planet stemming from the belief that all life is shk interconnected so rather than be something secular it is something shk very sacred i would go further and say that much of the damage to the environment has been caused by the secular worldview or by the humanist worldview and especially by the secular humanist worldview this is not to say that all secular humanists are necessarily avid destroyers of the environment and i am sure that there are many who are concerned about the environment but at the time of the renaissance and ref ormation in western europe man became the centre or the focus of culture hence humanism this consciousness was also secular in the sense that it was concerned primarily with the present age r ather than the age to come capitalism arose at the same time and the power of economics became central in philosophy this doesn t mean that economics did not exist before simply that it began to dominate the conscious cultural values of western european society and its offshoots this cultural shift was in its later stages accompanied by industrial revolutions and the values that justified them there was a fundamental cultural shift in the meaning of economics from the christian view of man as the economos the steward of creation to the secular idea of man as the slave of economic forces and powers there were denominational differences among the new worshippers of mammon for some the name of the deity was the free rein of the market mechanism while for others it was the dialectical forces of history but in both the capitalist west and the socialist east the environment was sacrificed on the altar of mammon the situation was mitigated in the west because thos e who were concerned about the damage to the environment had more freedom to oppose what was happening and state their case steve golded
