"The First Thing to Be Said About This Modern Nature Worship is That It is Most Extraordinarily Dim."

David Mills is taking on the nature bigots who ridicule religion:

Nature is entirely selfish and utterly amoral. It’s indifferent to pain. It’s soaked in the blood of the innocent.

And yet some people say that we ought to abandon the old religions and worship nature. Writing on the website of a serious English magazine, someone calling himself (or herself) “Pagan Artist” wrote in a cheerful Mary Poppins kind of way: “What is wrong with worshipping God’s creation itself? The sun, the moon, the stars, the air, the trees, the rivers, the sea — we cannot live for a day without them.”

He then explained why this made him want to worship nature and not the god of any established religion: “For me, that makes them divine because they give us the ultimate gift of life. Organized religions on the other hand have given us nothing but death and destruction. Nature gives us life. Organized religions give us death. Which one should we hold divine and worship with reverence?”

Let us set aside the claim that “organized religions” have given the world lots of bad things and no good things. It’s just silly. Walk around any major city and note the number of hospitals with names like “Mercy Hospital” and “Our Lady of . . .” and “Beth Israel.” Where did the modern hospital come from but from the medical care dispensed freely by the monks of the Middle Ages?

Look at the new pagan case at its best. It claims that we ought to revere nature because it gives us life, as Pagan Artist said. You can easily think of all sorts of wonderful things to be found in Nature. The Christian would say that the wonderful things we find are wonderful gifts given us by a loving God, but let that go for a second.

The first thing to be said about this modern nature worship is that it is most extraordinarily dim. Sure, we find in nature pretty sunsets, and cute little bunnies and kittens, and warm sunny breezy spring days, and the awe-inspiring mechanics of life on earth and the equally awe-inspiring movement of the stars and galaxies.

But we also find physical decay, cancer, earthquakes. Those cute kittens grow up to eat the cute bunnies. The weather that produces the beautiful spring days will also produce killing cold snaps and hurricanes that destroy everything in their path. The mechanics of life on earth produce death as much as life, and indeed depend on death to maintain the balance. What is to you a horrible death from cancer is for Nature simply a way of adjusting the population.

I don’t know why anyone would want to worship this, unless — like the real pagans — they’re desperate to make it like them and spare them its worst. That’s not worship as we understand it, but bribery. Some of the ancient pagan religions would do almost anything to bribe the nature gods, including sacrificing their own children.

Reading the whole thing is a must.

Look I see this to be a both/and endeavor, not an either/or.  I love sunsets.  I love the great outdoors.  I particularly love mountains and beaches and clouds and wind.  But I also, in a most flawed and incomplete way, love God and God's ways and in fact, I think it's that love for God that enhances my love for nature.

When I see an exclusive nature lover, I see a potential God lover or minimally, an incomplete one.  It's the beauty of God that I think makes nature all the more beautiful.  But it's also the potential ugliness of nature, nature's cruelty and harshness, that ought to make us run toward the arms of Him who provides shelter from that cruelty and harshness.

Yes, I love nature, but I'm not so blind as to miss the fact that nature cannot love me back.