Whole Earth God

What Good is a Morality That Doesn’t Encompass All Life on Earth?

This Essay Originally Appeared at ReligionDispatches.org

I woke up the other morning with a conversation going on in my head. This happens often and seems to be both a part of my creative process and my life of prayer. I never know who these conversations are with. Usually I am the one talking. The other mostly listens. But every now and then that voice will say something, invariably no more than a single sentence, and that is what I remember when I wake. That morning it was this: “Fifty years from now, when people look back on the literature of the past century, they will judge it primarily on the basis of one question: Did it prepare us for this?”

By now, a growing number of people have begun to realize what “this” refers to. In my case it was the predictions made in a small book of environmental writing I’d finished reading just the night before.

What Religion Needs to Get Right...If It Doesn't Want to Go Wrong

I've noticed that every time I offer an analysis of religion in a public forum--not of any particular religion, but of religion as a whole--invariably there are some who rush to assure me that what I say does not apply to them.

"I'm a Buddhist," one will say. "What I practice isn't a religion; it's a way of life." Another will insist that Unitarian Universalism has long since abandoned the tribalism associated with the major Abrahamic faiths. Yet another will patiently inform me that what I say about religion being quintessentially anthropocentric, and therefore cut off from Nature, does not apply to the Native American tradition, which has never lost its connection to the Earth.

This is what they say, but it isn't what I hear. What I hear is that they don't want to be wrong.

This is, of course, completely understandable. Wrong is the last place any of us wants to be. In the world we have made for ourselves over the past few thousand years, there are consequences for being wrong, and those consequences are sometimes dire. As a result, we live in fear of it. We fear wrong decisions, fear being wrong-headed, fear taking a wrong turn in life. In countries with a strong judicial system (or a weak and violent one), the last place we want to get caught is "in the wrong." Being in the wrong can make you an outsider, an outcast, or a prisoner. It can even get you killed. And so we worry about it, and that is what makes us religious.