SO WHAT'S SACRED THESE DAYS?

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In the sacred scriptures, there were

explanations given for an ethics

encompassing the world of nature as well

as that of human beings. Animals and

plants were seen as God's creation, with

spiritual value, as were rivers and mountains.

Those notions are now scientifically

meaningless, and any environmental ethics

based on that view of the world is based on

mere sentimentality. It is not based on

reality, if you accept the scientific view of

the world as reality.

It's like talking about the sacredness

of human life. In one breath we mention

the sacredness of human life and with

the next breath note that its basis is

nothing but DNA. What is sacred about

DNA if it is just some molecules banging

against each other in certain configurations?

If we reject the sacred, reject that it is the

wisdom of God that is imprinted upon

the DNA, that all creation bears the

imprint of God - a meaningless statement

in modern biology - where then does the

sacredness of human life come from?

Even the withering away of Christian

ethics, which we now see before us after

several hundred years of its survival even

since the Scientific Revolution, has to do

a lot with the more recent consequences

of the extension of the desacralized view

of nature into the domain of human life

itself. This is especially notable when it

comes to environmental ethics, which we

need to create in a serious way if we are

to be able to live in the future.

For now, animal activists and others

like them are outside of the mainstream.

They are considered "crazy people"

who tie themselves to trees and refuse

to come down. These acts are not part

of the mainstream of society, which is

not able to develop an environmental

ethic that is also in accord with the

worldview that dominates our lives.

A similar disjunction occurs in our

hospitals because of the purely mechanical

treatment of the human body, and tensions

are created by the fact that some people

still believe they have a soul and that the

human body is not just a mechanical gadget.

All of these tensions present great challenges

that the still dominant worldview poses for us,

and are signs that this paradigm is

now falling apart.

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Seyyed Hossein Nasr

From "In The Beginning Was Consciousness"

The Harvard Divinity Bulletin

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