Religion and Ecological Responsibility

Robert Tulip

An Ecological Meditation on the Lord’s Prayer
Our Father in Heaven: Religious thought is oriented towards a vision of ultimate and absolute truth, and aims to worship a God who is real. Starting from the assumption that God is real, analogical language is required to convey a vision of this real God to ignorant humans, now and even more so in the past. If we conceive divinity as the infinite and eternal totality of all that has been, is now and ever will be, science considers this through the universe proceeding from singularity to its end, with speculation about anything beyond the observable limits of time and space. Christianity collects this unknown totality with the analogical concept of Our Father in Heaven. However, the prayer says this deistic totality is somehow “ours.” This indicates that in smaller parts of the totality, for example our galaxy, our solar system or our planet, the original unity is also present, and that humanity can in some way relate to it in a familial way, as indicated in the Trinitarian doctrine that God is not God without relationship, that the cosmic relationship between Jesus and the universe is manifest today in spirit. The patriarchal Christian tradition uses the metaphor ‘father’, to indicate that just as a human father cares for and protects his family, so God cares for our planet. Yet there is nothing ultimately gendered about reality, so this metaphor breaks down. A problem with traditional religion is that it takes the original metaphor as a reality, and fails to take the necessary step of looking into it to deconstruct its mythic meaning. Our Father in Heaven has been the prime victim of this literalist reading, as the selfish individual desire for immortality has been projected on to religion, turning our father into an old man in the sky, and turning heaven into a place good people go after death. Science has found evidence for neither, so they should be considered against a scientific analogical framework.
Hallowed Be Thy Name: Jehovah is considered in the Judeo-Christian tradition as the single ultimate God, bringing together all imagined deities into an ultimate unity. If Jehovah is seen as the infinite eternal, ‘hallowing’ suggests that humanity is called to an attitude of reverence towards the ultimate determinant of our fate. We are to worship the universe as a pointer towards how we can adapt our lives to be in harmony with the absolute. Again, monotheism, in its fallen human interpretations, has hallowed idols rather than the one true God, demanding worship of created church doctrine rather than an open reverence towards the whole. There is a hallowing of the ultimate in many religious traditions, and respectful dialogue can open and deepen understanding of the unity of all faiths, from Islam to science and paganism, from Buddhism and Hinduism to Judaism and Christianity.
Thy Kingdom Come: Here we have the eschatological vision at the centre of the faith of Jesus. Eschatology is the doctrine of the end. Traditionally this has been interpreted as ‘the end of the world’ (eg in the King James Bible), but this phrase is a mis-translation of the Biblical phrase ‘the end of the age.’ I interpret this teaching against precessional cosmology, a complex topic which suggests long term cosmic planetary transformation through ages which are each about 2148 years long, with the equinoctial age of Pisces-Virgo now nearing its end and the equinoctial age of Aquarius-Leo due to start in about 140 years. The relation of this astronomical wheel of time to the Biblical doctrine of the Kingdom of God arises as we consider how the reign of God consists in humanity having explicit relationship to the whole, a relationship that is not opaque but transparent. Scientific knowledge is steadily replacing folk belief as the basis of human identity, giving us the capacity to transform our planet into a site of cosmic harmony. The Bible presents a vision of the new age of the kingdom of God in the book of revelation, where the holy city of New Jerusalem is envisioned as a place to reconcile all the nations of the world. My vision of the holy city is central to a prophecy of the physical evolution of humanity, whereby over the coming Aquarian age we will migrate to the sea, inhabiting the 71% of our planet covered by ocean, by building new cities founded on enormous fresh water dams floating around the world currents. The ocean is on average eight kilometres deep, and a fresh water dam of size one cubic kilometre (one teralitre) will provide a platform sitting 25 metres above the ocean surface, upon which we can build cities, farms, factories, airports and all the benefits of modern technology, while leaving the continents to the animals and plants so they can recover from the human assault of the last age. This proposal involves a solution to the problem of global warming – by floating immense fabric sheets several metres below the ocean surface and using robot whales to bring nutrient from the ocean depth, and wave energy to pump in CO2 from the air, immense algal blooms can rapidly reduce atmospheric carbon from its current 800 gigatonnes to the historic norm of 500 gigatonnes, while also producing fuel and food. This proposal should win the Branson Earth Challenge.
Thy Will Be Done: Ultimately, the law of evolution shows that any organism which fails to adapt to its environment becomes extinct. At present the natural environment includes a rampaging human empire, so adaptation by other species requires that we change. Ecologists understand this problem as the revenge of Gaia. It is not about mythology but about science. We know the ‘will’ of nature will be done – whatever will be will be. The question is how humanity can reconcile with nature to make us part of the future. The prayer for God’s will to be done also recognises that our current understanding is very far from the will of God, so the prayer seeks alignment between human behaviour and ultimate reality. The essence of divinity in its presence in a specific place is the adaptivity of the organisms in that place to the ultimate laws of nature.
On Earth as it is in Heaven: Here we require a key reformation of orthodox theology. Heaven is not a place that good people go after death, but a vision of what the earth could become. The prayer states that the will of God is now done in heaven, by which we should understand both the operation of universal scientific laws of physics, and the prophetic vision of how our planet could be aligned to these universal laws. Statements of moral priorities such as the Beatitudes at Matthew 5 and the Last Judgement at Matthew 24-25 indicate the political changes required to make the last first.
Give us this day our daily bread: A simple diet enables sufficient nutrition. Nature is the source of our food, and we are called to respect nature as the divine source of our sustenance.
Forgive Us Our Sins, as we forgive those that sin against us: The alienation of human culture from the god of the universe is rather extreme, and has produced a diverse pathology. If conduct is analysed openly, we have a path to reconciliation and the dissolution of hostility. Unrepentant promotion of false belief is the greatest stumbling block in the way of divine forgiveness.
Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Transforming our planet on evolutionary lines into a place of harmony requires change in basic human instincts which have developed over our long emergence. The incentives which worked ten million years ago before our ancestors diverged genetically from other higher primates are often better than our current alienated loneliness, but these instinctive desires also have allowed our species to fall into pathologies which are highly maladaptive for a new global civilization. The temptation can be identified and resisted to eat and watch and do things which our genes enjoy but which shorten our lives and reduce our happiness and create social dangers.
But Deliver Us From Evil: There is high risk of human extinction from the current dangerous trends on our planet. The main risks are climate change and nuclear war.
For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: As discussed here, the God of the universe is the ultimate determinant of what happens on our planet. By giving God the glory we can participate in this kingdom of power as agents of God.
For Ever and Ever, Amen: God rules the universe eternally, and our tiny window on time is the smallest fraction of the aeons that stretch before and after us. The Lord’s Prayer offers a finite and focussed path of hope to enable humanity to continue to participate in the wonderful life of our beautiful planet.
Robert Tulip, Canberra Australia, 25 September 2008

Thomas Hood


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