Ideas of Nature: Prevalence & Ethicality

[Dissident Dan]

Ideas of "nature"

For a good portion of my life, I used and heard used the "word" nature with an assumption that my use of the word nature was like nearly all others' use of the word. I heard the phrase "Mother Nature" used and thought of it much like the phrase "Father Time" -- an anthropomorphism that wasn't meant to be taken literally, just a colorful, little phrase. When I thought of "valueing nature", I thought of valueing the creatures and/or subjective beautry of this world.

I did not thing of nature as itself being some entity, and I assumed others had the same kind of notion of "nature" as I did. Yet, as I grow older, it seems apparent to me that some others have a more Gaia-like idea of nature.

How prevalent are such Gaia ideas?

In addition, is their ethicality or morality in being "natural" or "unnatural"?

 

[MacTech]

Well I think Dr. Ross was pretty hot in the one scene with, oh this isn't about the movie is it, lol

Anyway. Yes some believe that nature is of its own divine conscience and imo comes from the fact that such great events were at the time and still are to some degree hard to explain. Nature is very complex and that is why much of the natural events like.. rain, snow, growth, life, etc were explained by gods in many cultures. A gaia would be like the combination of all of these in a way and so the gaia hypothesis was created.

http://erg.ucd.ie/arupa/references/gaia.html

Of course after reading this i personally like the "matrix" theories better ;) lol. Anyway the first time i heard of gaia was in fact the movie Final Fantasy so imo it isn't that widely held, of course I could totally be wrong.

 

[FZ+]

In addition, is their ethicality or morality in being "natural" or "unnatural"?

I don't think so. Man is part of nature. It may be rather harsh, but I attribute the whole "back to nature" movement as a case of mass survivor guilt. The Gaia hypothesis itself is interesting, but I think rather overplayed - I do not think it constitutes a theory itself, but just a perspective from which to look at things from a greater scale.

 

[olde drunk]

while we are a part of nature, somehow with modern thought, we have separated ourselves.

the movement back to nature is to observe how nature unfolds spontaneously.

we need to more in tune with this union and how we can learn from nature.

peace,