Time Mag: ‘The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday’ – Urges ‘an earth-reverent belief system’ complete with ‘reverence’ & ‘hymns’ & ‘prophets’
PAUL GREENBERG & CARL SAFINA in Time Mag: Greenberg teaches in NYU’s Animal Studies Program & authored The Climate Diet. Safina holds the Endowed Research Chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University.
"For the two of us environmentalists—one of us nominally Jewish, the other a recovering Catholic—we find the ill-defined nature of the only day honoring the place that makes life itself possible more than a little sacrilegious. So, on this 53rd Earth Day we thought it useful to pose what a real Earth Day should represent and how it could form a central time for a new approach to worship....One day out of 365 to mark the entire planet is too far a cry from the reverence and recognition owed the beleaguered planetary basis for our entire existence, for all known life."
"So, what would an earth-reverent belief system look like with Earth Day at its center? ... The Jewish Torah wraps around the year nicely...What if a book like that existed for the Earth? What if it were replete with hymns to this world of the living? What if it contained the stories of the prophets of natural earth knowledge—Darwin and Carson, Galileo and Humboldt? ... Are we proposing a whole new religion? We’re not quite sure. Maybe an old one. ... In short, we must make nature central to our belief system with Earth Day or any number of earth-focused ceremonial days serving as regular reminders of what we owe our home planet.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2023/04/22/time-mag-the-case-for-making-earth-day-a-religious-holiday-urges-an-earth-reverent-belief-system-complete-with-reverence-hymns-prophets/
