Gods Earth Religion as if Matter Really

God’s Earth: Religion as if Matter Really Mattered general consensus:      we’re in trouble, it’s our actions. especially tech and population growth      we can’t keep our hands to ourselves (manipulative)      “ecological autism” ahtoropocentrism

spirituality/ecology: belong together?      process of spiritual conversion 174      “biological and existential identification with other living things” + land, earth      fast or slow -> specific time and place (coalfields)      “the need to build dams"

     empathy feel suffering of trees, animals, land      modern individuality at stake in this conversion? 176      first, the transformation, then the intellectual understanding      science could be in the service of following up our ecological conversion

     direct, rooted experience -> transformation, ecological conversion (self-realization) -> reinforced -> seek intellectual understanding

Comparing Christianity with “North American religion”       western “concept of ‘nature’ as a religiously neutral reality      non-western experience of land expanded. Feels like Muir writing about God’s presence in the Sierra

4 aboriginal concepts      1. everywhere is sacred, god-given      2. land inalienable      3. incontrovertible right of possession (Here’s the problem. Westerners feel the same way)      3. Specific individual relationship with specific places

Westerners have relationship with the whole of a landscape?  // road trips Migratory societies (us) do not see intrinsic value in land First generation remains remote, alien (My Antonia) Alienation important       Migrants used to support “Taming the land” “boom” world as “set of problems created by nature awaiting their technical solutions"      (what would empathy for settlers look like) 

Conversion (181)      personal or communal crisis      epistimelogical shift       prophets      time of decision      kairos == time for decisions to be made      repentance -> see yourself in perspective -> stop following “our own heart”       cool sentence on hardness of heart      (communal repentance allow us to step out of anthtopocentrism)      recasts “humans as fulfillment of God’s plan” as sinful      Who the hell is Thomas Berry??? “the affliction of the world, its demonic presence” (The Dream of the Earth, Berry)

Self-realization      vulnerability      in some way, connects to lower-level dependence on, rootedness in the earth      we are not angels (giving up modern individuality)       criticizes “anthropocentric self-righteousness” (connects to above)      * going through process of conversion process, making a critique of modernity      myths as shielding us from truths about ourselves      “a pious self-righteousness protects so many from a genuine religious encounter with God"           -> What would the ecological equivalent of this be?       COSMOS          CONVERSION: crisis ->  repentance (self-realization) -> new attitude on life           not just an allegory to spirituality, this is spiritual conversion

Is it true “only a god can save us”?      Heidegger: Technology = all pervasive power in our lives and in western culture      technology = mode of being -» the medium is YOU      technology severs you from your ability to care about the beingness, rather you see the world in terms of usefulness, whose parameters are determined by the technology      we forget “Being in all its limitless possibilities” as we become focus on technology and its particular manifestations       QUOTE with fungible 187      we commodify ourselves by commodifying the world through technology—we serve the technology that we thought serves us      it’s not that we’ve done wrong, it’s that we’ve become bad           we already don’t decide whether to use/live as technology—that decision was made by Descartes with the invention of the modern mechanism (the original sin of technology)      in order to overcome the metaphysical problem of having surrendered a world of beingness to a world of technology, we need a new non-technological, but rather theological Gestell (frame) for nature and reality      we will have to “poetize” & imagine      The author asks what this god will look like?

God of the modern physicists      modern physics, particularly theories about the origin of the earth, calls into question the role of God as creator

Desire to be both poet and scientist—not wanting to be literal/technologist/naive about symbolism? but also not wanting to be unscientific