Nature Spirituality and Pop Culture Midterm Study Set

Rachel Carson/Silent Spring (1962)

1962; from environmentalism movement; book about the impact of DDT on the food chain. warned about misuse of chemical pesticides.

Wicca

A Contemporary Pagan movement that seeks harmony with the forces of nature and worships both the female and male aspects of the divine. Emphasizing female usually.

Hinduism

A bricolage of many different traditions in india. Blanket Term.

The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis (1969)

Lynn White Jr.

Pantheism

identifying god with nature; belief in all gods

Ara Norenzayan

religion promoted co-operation to counter conflict. Watched people are nice people. Fear of punishment is higher than off of reward. Religious groups cooperate in order to compete.

Polytheism

the belief in or worship of more than one god.

Panentheism

the belief or doctrine that God is greater than the universe and includes and interpenetrates it.

Hierophany

the spontaneous explosion of the sacred into the world.

Ecocentrism

whole ecological systems have value

Bensen Saler

Coined the Family Resemblence approach to religion.

Roberta Bella

Coined the concept of civil religion and the national cult.

East Asian, China

Confucian and Daoism

Cosmogony

Creation myth of the universe

Walter Burkert

Creation of the sacred: tracks of biology in early religions (1996)

Bricolage

Cultural processes where in bits and pieces of ideas and practices, drawn from variety of social actors, are amalgamated into new cultural forms.

Popculture

Culture found in a large, heterogeneous society that shares certain habits despite differences in other personal characteristics.

The Natural History of Religion (1757)

David Hume

Gaian Spirituality perceives the super-organism to have literal consciousness. Gaian Naturalism is skeptical of supernaturalistic metaphysics and i more likely to restrict its claims to the scientific mainstream as a basis for understanding.

Difference between Gaian Spirituality and Gaian Naturalism

Spiritual Animism there is an immaterial, super naturalistic dimension to the Animistic perception. Naturalistic Animism those who are agnostic or skeptical of any immaterial dimension underlying the life-forms or natural forces they wish to understand/communicate.

Difference between Spiritual Animism and Naturalistic Animism

Daoism

Does NOT stress rules and rituals but harmony with the world and nature.

Biophilia (1984)

E.O Wilson

Sociobiology (1975)

E.O Wilson

"The Only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing"

Edmund Burke

Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

Edmund Burke

Primitive Culture (1871)

Edward Burnett Tylor

South Asian

Hindu and Buddihst

Sociology of Knowledge

How you know what you know

Culture

Ideas and Values of a group of people. Location based usually.

Harmonic Convergence

In 1987 Age Philosopher Jose Arguelles called people to gather at 'sacred' sites for August 1987 16-17, specifically 144,000. This was because it was the beginning of 25 year transition into into a new age of peace and harmony denoted in ancient Aztec Calendar. This new age would free humanity from technology and bring the world closer to nature.

Daniel Quinn

Ishmael and the Story of B. The concept of takers and leavers. That the agricultural revolution wasn't about increased efficiency but power and its leading to the downfall of our society.

Islam

Islam respects the prophets of Judaism and Christianity as their own and treat Jesus as a prophet. Muhhamad is their main prophet. The are also secular musilms.

The Golden Bough (1890)

James G. Frazer

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)

argues, hierophanies give structure and orientation to the world, establishing a sacred order. The "profane" space of nonreligious experience can only be divided up geometrically: it has no "qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation [is] given by virtue of its inherent structure". Thus, profane space gives man no pattern for his behavior. In contrast to profane space, the site of a hierophany has a sacred structure to which religious man conforms himself.

Max Muller (1823-1900)

concluded that all ancient myths are about nature and natural phenomenon Invented the scientific studies of religion.

Animism

destined as life breath or soul Today refers to perceptions that natural entities, forces and nonhuman life forms have one or more of the following: a soul, person-hood, consciousness ( which sometimes includes spiritual intelligence or powers.)

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

1. British biologist who wrote "On the Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" 2. Challenged the idea of special creation by proposing a revolutionary theory of biological evolution 3. Concluded that every living plant and animal takes a part in a constant "struggle for existence" in which only the "fittest" survive 4. However, he also talked about the compassion of all living things towards each other and that empathy was the strongest human instinct.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

1. Enlightened thinker best known for writing "The Social Contract" and "Emile" 2. Uncorrupted Morales prevail in Nature and Autocratic civilizations corrupt. 3. True Nature has a sublime quality. 4. Rejected excessive rationalism and stressed emotions, thus anticipating the romantic movement

Buddhism

1. Life as we know it causes suffering 2. Desire can cause suffering 3. Letting Desire go can free someone from aging or even death 4. It is possible to gain enlightenment by avoiding extremes and pleasure seeking. Being kind to all sentient beings. Engaging in meditations or rituals to overcome these disillusion. THE BIGGEST ILLUSION TO OVERCOME IS THE IMAGE OF A TRUE UNCHANGING SELF The doctrine of co-dependent flourishing has been used to promote eco - friendly buddihst behavior.

Confucianism

A philosophy or religion that stressed value of harmony. People in Confucian societies often hybridize it with other metaphysical religions. The collective pursuit of harmony of all things by imparting civic responsibility.

Neo-Paganism

A revival of spiritual animism or the revival of a fragmented religion persecuted by Abrahamic Traditions.

Civil Religion and Religous Nationalism

A type of nationalism in which an idea or persons are elevated to transcendent level. Promotes two types of feeling: Social solidarity and location attachment. Concept that god assisted in settling the country and that god consecrated the land.

"The Map is not the Territory'

Alfred Korzybski (1979-1950) But maps are useful guides if imperfect

Religous Mysticism as "Perennial Philosophy"

All religions have a shared mystical path under different name.

E.B. Tylor (1832-1917)

Animism is the belief the world is full intelligence, malicious or beneficent. Argued its completely rational of primitive people to come to the conclusions they do.

Big Gods (2013)

Ara Norenzayan

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Argued the sublime is evoked with the feeling of astonishment after encounters with great religious powers. Things like this are the ocean or the Grand Canyon. Argued terror is the essence of the divine

Stewart Guthrie

Argues religious human attribution to non-living things. That religion can be best understood as systematized anthropomorphism. Humans developed a hyper active agency detecting device.

Shintoism

Belief in the Kami and other supernatural forces. Ancestral spirits are the Kami. Performing rituals to appease the Kami. This and other themes are common among indigenous traditions. Great leaders can become Kami e.g The Emperor

Ideaoloy

Belief, Values, Worldview.

James G. Frazer (1854-1941)

Believed human belief progressed in stages. Those stages being polytheism -> monotheism ->science That the worship of the departed is the most widely spread form of natural superstition. What we may call the worship of nature is based on natural phenomena.

Biocentrism

Centered around protecting living things

Christianity

Christianity and Islam both hold views of heaven and hell. There less in Judiasm but some sects have taken this viewpoint in. According to these religions, the world will end according to the will of god.

David Sloan Wilson (1949-present)

Church of Darwinism

Judiasm

Many Jews embrace the ethnic tradition but aren't religious. Judaism drew on a variety of other religions of its time. The covenant is that if people worshiped god he would love ad protect them. Fidelity to god is essential.

'The Myth of the Sacred Cow' (1965)

Marvin Harris

Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873)

Max Muller

E.O. Wilson (1929-present)

Our ethical behavior promotes pro-socialization. Humans evolved with a tendency towards nature. Our sense of beauty is hardwired because a clean ecosystem is better than a non-clean ecosystem, over millennia of evolution.

Zoroastrianism

Perceived human history as a struggle between a good and evil god. Every human being acts out this struggle.

"It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility. "

Rachel Carson

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."

Rachel Carson

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.

Rachel Carson

Quasi-religion | Implicit religion | para-religion

Religion-resembling social phenomena without non-material divine beings or forces.

Axial Age

Religions emerge between 1000-00 BCE. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto (in Japan), Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Axial Age Philosophers and religious leaders were concerned about grand scale.

Apocalystisism

Religious narratives or myths that have to do with the ending of the world.

Pigs for the Ancestors

Roy Rappaport

David Hume (1711-1776)

Saw nature itself as the source for the direct human apprehension of the sacred

East Asia, Japan

Shinto and Zen Buddhism

Millue

Society Hodgepodge

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Sociology as a separate science on the grounds that it has both an object (patterned reularities as a group distinct from that of individuals) and a substratum (society as a whole). Religion is a fundamentally social phenomena

Religion of the Market

Speaking as if the stock market has agency.

Faces in the Clouds (1993)

Stewart Guthrie

Roy Rappaport (1926-1997)

Talked about how religion evolved with sustainability.

James Redfield

The Celestine Prophesy and the idea that humanity has erred by taking "energy" from one another instead of producing it themselves, creating the society we live in. When everyone achieves maximum "energy" the world we live in will merge with the divine world that is parallel to ours.

Ishmael

The agricutural revolution is bad and to figure out why.

Marvin Harris (1927-2001)

The concept that things of religious value such as the cows in India were consecrated because they had a benefit to the ecosystem that was greater than the benefit of eating them.

Lynn White Jr.

The root of the ecological crisis is blamed on Abrahamic Traditions (western monotheism). Anthropocentric ad Hierarchical beliefs. The scientific and technological solution will not solve the problem. The eastern religions of Confucianism and Daoism are more ecologically friendly.

Dark Green Religion

This is the religion espoused in Bron Taylor's Dark Green Religion: Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Taylor promotes a religion in which nature is sacred and has intrinsic value, everything is connected and mutually interdependent, and one can experience feelings of belonging in nature. Dark green religion is also based off of animism (there is spiritual energy in natural things) and Gaiaism (the earth as a whole is an organism of which we are but a part). It also promotes a transcendental lineage in which body and spirit are both connected to nature.

John Muir (1838-1914)

This noted naturalist split with conservationists like Gifford Pinchot by trying to protect natural "temples" like the Hetch Hetchy Valley from development. In 1892 he founded the Sierra Club, which is now one of the most influential conservation organizations in the United States. His writings and philosophy shaped the formation of the modern environmental movement. Cedar Keys

Gaian Earth Religion

Understands the biosphere to be alive of conscious or at least to resemble organisms with their many interdependent parts.

Collective Effervescence

a community or society may at times come together and simultaneously communicate the same thought and participate in the same action.