Religion and the Quest for a Sustainable World:
Engaging Religions to Shape Worldview:
Ritual and Taboo as Ecological Guardians:
Religious institutions are powerful and carry great influence. The environmentalist movements will be amplified if the support of those institutions can be won. When pursing like interests it is a wise decision to team up and unite similarities. The passages note that an ethical dilemma exists when using religion as a means to push an agenda. Religion is a powerful influence in politics, business, and culture already so involvement itself is not unethical however stating that people of an entire faith supports a particular agenda would be foolish and highly unethical. It would be better to position itself behind its members who support the agenda for the same religious reasons those institutions support.
The claim that ecological crises extend to culture and human spirit can be substantiated with science in that humans are part of nature and our spirit is affected by survivability. Using religion as a means of control is dangerous because anything that distracts from religious messages not inherent to that religion could be sinful. Cultures have used the institution of religion as a means of control throughout history however for the religious there can be serious repercussions to that kind of influence especially since faith is not all substantiated or denounced through science. Often time’s religion uses faith as a way to teach peoples how to live and survive without providing the reasons for that behavior. The links drawn between consumerism and greed discussed in many religious perspectives substantiate that claim.
Creating rituals and taboos to reform culture would eventually reach a culture behaving in a similar fashion however; this is the same thing as revising tradition to a more sustainable fashion. Rather than implementing resorting to very old rituals and taboos it would be more effective to create a campaign to reform how we practice our current traditions. Typical rites of passages have been consumed by consumerist ideals adding heavy financial and environmental costs. Not only is there an argument for environmental sustainability but there is also an argument for getting consumerism out of the way of the actual purpose and principal of these occasions.
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