Mother Earth – Protecting her

Gaia is the creative and protective goddess of mother earth. Worship of her is relatively simple – protect mother earth and keep her safe, because she is the only home that you have.

If we go back into pre-history, we find that the very earliest faiths that mankind had were nature based. We see evidence of this in the surviving beliefs of our native peoples. They regularly speak peacefully and quietly of their reverence for mother nature.

We in the West are inheritors of male dominated monotheistic faiths. The arose in the Middle East. First came Judaism, then Christianity and then Islam. They did not easily tolerate earlier nature based feminine religions. When the Israelites long ago invaded present-day Palestine, they encountered nature-based faiths. They were not to be tolerated. In one of the more ghastly statements in the Old Testament, Yahweh the God of Israel instructed the invading Israelites to destroy whole towns, killing every man, woman and child.

“So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb, and  utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.“ (Joshua 10:40) This was the horror of an early God-inspired genocide!

These three monotheistic faiths have a view of the earth radically different from early nature-based faiths. In the Bible, early mankind is told to multiply and dominate the earth.

“Then God said ,’Let  us make man in our image. After out likeness ; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea. And the birds of the air, and over the cattle , and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” (Gen.1:26)

Presently the planet is being ravaged by mankind’s excessive exploitation of her resources. Our fossil-fuel-based economy is slowly crating a dangerous future. The climate is warming, the sea level is rising and extreme weather conditions are increasing.

It is true that this planet, mother earth, has known extreme climate changes in the past. About 10,000 years ago the earth was again warming and emerging out of an “ice age”. However, the change now creeping upon us is very different from past events. 

First, the present environmental change is largely produced by our prodigious population of over 7 billion souls. Never has the world been populated by so many productive, consumptive and contaminating people. As a result, our whole species is now beginning to experience the effects of the coming climate change.

What to do? Should we not harken to the call of those earlier nature – based faiths and work to protect mother nature , work cooperatively and walk more lightly on her soil? If we do not, we will soon suffer the consequences of our inaction.