Can Christians love nature?

[sdelsolray]

Can Christians love nature?

I think it depends on the particular Christian God Virus that infects them. Here in the USA, there are several strains of the virus that convince believers to have no respect for nature, the environment or other humans who do not demonstrate they are similarly infected.

 

[Gnostic Christian Bishop]

Folks,

I am reading Jonothan Dimbleby’s book on Russia. In it he writes of the orthodox church.

“Orthodoxy was a powerful opiate that taught that life on earth was merely a transition towards either heaven or hell…..”

It seems reasonable to assume that such believers will not regard this world as home, and if we add in the poison of the ‘the fall’ with its claim of existential corruption of all living things from the moment of conception, the transition becomes even less attractive as a place to love and nurture.

Dimbleby is speaking of orthodoxy, but what Christian does not believe in this eschatology and the dogma of the fall? How can such a believer love nature or give it positive value?

A.

Christians tend to think that God cursed the world as you indicate in Eden and the fall.

Jews, who wrote genesis, do not buy into the fall and see Eden as where man was elevated.

I think Jews were on their way to a decent moral ideology before Christianity turned the moral of the story from our elevation to our fall.

Somehow, Christians see the punch line of Gen 3, --- they have become as Gods in the knowing of good and evil, --- as a fall.

It seems that Christians do not think man is a better man with the moral sense that the knowledge good and evil gives us.

We Gnostic Christians call the earth evolving perfection as we know we live in the best of all possible worlds, given the history that got us here.

That is not to say we cannot imagine better. It is just that the world cannot be better, given our history and entropy.

Regards
DL