In general terms concerning the relationships of
religions as sign systems and their interaction with the world of nature we can
make the following remarks:
·
The roots of religious ideologies come from the antiquity, when the
status of human population was fundamentally different, and the issues of
ecological balance disruption were not so sharp and acute.
·
A basic model of religions determines the nature of interaction among
people;
·
Frequently or nearly always the "man - nature " relationship is
not in the focal point of religious consciousness and even of the religious
system itself;
·
Ecological limits are practically not taken into account in any of the
large full-fledged religions;
In its essence the religion is the system outside
nature, as it requires the presence of consciousness.
And it is possible to see here a gap between
symbolical and substantial in the ecological approach.
It turns out that the symbolical type of
problem solution offered by one or other cult system appears to be more
significant for the people, than a real resolution of the problem.
The man is constantly striving to put the world in
order providing explanations, first of all religious or scientific.
Through these explanations, i.e. transformation of the phenomena into a sign
shape one can build the system of relationships. The explanation or description of the world
is the beginning of building the relationships with it. Instead of a word “world” we can say “nature”
and in such a way derive a multitude of its descriptions. It turns out that during the period of its
development the mankind changed the pictures of nature description, and generated
a number of “natural ethics”. At that their environmental sensitivity and
structure of the relationships between the man and the environment are
different and even contradictory.
The history testifies that the man’s attitude to
nature never underwent any significant changes, if worldview components of our
thinking were not changed, as well as our affections and beliefs.
We will never manage to closely link nature
protection with human existence or to make nature the norm of human behavior,
if environmental worldview is not formed.
Therefore the resolution of ecological crises requires environmental
reconsideration of our philosophy and morals rather than practical actions and
development of new technologies. And we
have enough grounds to link such a revision with the environmental ethics as a
new science.
Now we shall come to the model of description of
religions and beliefs, abundant in the past and existing nowadays in the territory
of Central Asia. Central Asia traditionally was the crossroads of numerous
worlds, including the religious ones. Practically all world religions in one or
other form can be found here. But we consider it to be important
to dwell upon only some of them in the context of our discussions about the
relationship between religion and nature.
Christianity is represented mainly
by the Orthodox branch and a number of communities of Protestant persuasion.
And here we can clearly see the binary opposition
“subject – object”, in which the role of the subject is, of course, assigned to
the nature. According to the given ethics the individual, the human being is
separated from the world of nature.
The ethics of Christianity says, that nature is a
trap and a prison for the spirit, the end of the greater world’s part and
saving of the smaller. The world is a one-time device. Natural is not moral,
natural is closer to satanic. On the one hand, the task is to understand
the encoded plan of the God. On the other hand, because of the Fall, we lose
the paradise and are not perfect in our cognition. A Christian of the Middle Ages
epoch is not interested in nature, the spiritual life for him is more significant,
than the life on the Earth.
But after the times of Reformation another ethical model started to be formed in
Christianity. So, referring to the fact that the Apocalypse speaks about the epoch of
a thousand-year empire, the new task is being formed – to build the paradise on
the Earth. A healthy natural environment, inter alia, becomes one of the elements
of the concept “the paradise on the Earth”. Thus, the ethics
has changed its concept and the nature ceased to be considered as a satanic
commencement, and there is no reason to struggle with it like with naturalness,
chaos. Now nature has to be saved and transformed to create “the paradise on the Earth”.
Many modern Christian clergymen speak about a restrained and careful attitude
to nature – the creation of the God. The Biblical theme of the environment is,
first of all, the help of nature in a divine punishment.
The Bible, as its thousand-year ideal, encourages certain symbiosis of animals
and people, in which all creatures alive coexist in peace. However, from the viewpoint of
the Bible, an indispensable condition of the environment’s health is the
observance of the Bible commandments, rather than a certain specific ethical
attitude to nature or a technique to protect resources.
Besides the conceptions about environment in the Bible, about its blessing or evil,
are linked to a small territory of the Middle East with its unique geography.
Islam.
In the past Islam, - if one tries to reconstruct it, – was perceived by the population
of remote villages as a socially self-contained phenomenon.
The perception of themselves by Moslems was pre-conditioned, first of
all, by their belonging to a concrete family or related group, to a clan or
community. The religious structure almost one-to-one reiterated the social structure
of a local community, and was built on it. One can say that not every
man alone was a Moslem, but a group of neighbors and relatives as a whole were
Moslems. Islam exhibited itself in public events, in family and activity-related
rituals, the participation in which was obligatory for all. In such
rituals the man had his own strictly assigned role, depending on the sex and
age. Being young a person was allowed not to read prayers and fast, and this was
not considered as a rude violation of the rules of a real Moslem’s life.
And on the contrary, elderly people were obliged to pray and fast regularly,
as well as to participate in all religious events. The public life of women was
separated from the public life of men.
The man became Moslem by the fact of his birth, instead of his attitude to religious
truths. As the man was considered as a Moslem already by virtue of his belonging
to one or other local community, the infringement of religious rules under any
valid pretext was not considered reprehensible. The presence of legible knowledge
about the belief and subtleties of dogmas was not obligatory. In relation
to nature Islam is similar to Christianity in many respects, as practically it
doesn’t consider the interrelationship between the man and natural environment
as significant.
This ethics doesn’t promote crisis overcoming either, as construction requires
certain relevant tools, which do not exist. Besides this is an outside
position in relation to the world. The man in his perception of the worldview
was put outside the world.
The following ethic-religious trends related to the
nature can be set apart in Central Asia:
Tengrianism, Shamanism and dualistic religions - Zoroastrism, Mitraism.
The religion of Tengry (Tengrianism
or Tenrianity) is, probably, one of the most
ancient religions on the planet, established as a philosophical doctrine as far
back as the 4th millennium B.C. It has become the “mother” of Semitic
and Indo-Iranian religions and has affected noticeably ancient Egypt cults.
Tengrianism is based on two fundamental conceptions: Tengry (Sky) and Umai-ene (mother-earth).
Tengry - a great celestial deity honored by Turkic tribes since ancient
times up to now. Those who trust in it considered that: “All human sons are born
to die at the time prescribed by the Sky”. But Tengry was not alone –
according to legends, there were nine Tengries in the world mountain.
The most solemn offering ceremonies are connected to
a celestial spirit - master. Kagans of
ancient Turkic tribes headed annual public praying to the Sky.
Kazakhs and Kyrgyzs, practicing Tengrianism,
similarly to their ancestors, worshipped the Sun at the time of sunrise.
Identifying Tengry with the sky, Kyrgyzs
called all Tien-Shan mountains as “Tengry-Too” (Sky-Mountains).
At the same time the man is an equal part of Nature
and is not an emanation of divine, he is the one, who should be held out within
the framework of that freedom, which was granted to him by the Sky, a celestial
deity. Therefore the man becomes more organic to nature and sensitive to natural cycles.
The emphasis is placed on the fact that the world is sacred in its natural
manifestations: water, fire, rock, rain, soil, etc. Social life and relations
do not contradict the Nature of the World.
Mitraism - a cult of Mitra, it is also called Saxon Mitraism - is a political religion,
which exists, according to the contemporary data, since the 1st
millennium B.C. and up to early Middle Ages among the peoples of Central Asia.
The key deity is Mitra. The fundamentals are the concepts of Truth
and Union. These categories are considered not only in a social context.
The Union takes place not only between the people, but also between the Man and
Nature. In this light the Union acts as a manifestation of Existence, but not human
morals. So, the Jasak - sayings of
Chinguizkhan (available nowadays in interpretation of Armenian, Persian,
Chinese and late Mongolian sources) mention that: “The one, who desecrated
water and fire, is obliged to death”.
Water and fire appear here as sacred manifestations of the essence of
nature.
But the nomad underlining of life, which was
the basis for the Avesta religion,
becomes to be more visible. Beliefs, legends and customs of pastoral
people are discovered everywhere in this sacred writ in a surprising link with
abstract dogmas and high-developed ethics of Zaratustrism (Zoroastrism).
For a Asiatic-zoroastrist the sanctity of a
cow and a dog is so much unshakable, as the sanctity of the very Ormuzd; they
are sacred not only in the sense that their death is a misfortune, and their
murder is an insult to the sacred object, but these animals are linked with
such myths and customs, which rather clearly demonstrate the belief in their
supernatural force.
It is also hardly possible to distinguish in Ormuzd
the elements linking him to the nature: the fact, that he stays in the empire
of light and that on the whole he dominates curative forces of nature, doesn’t
make him to be the God of nature and even less the force of nature.
And Avesta provides only a negligible
justification for a customary perception that Ormuzd with Ariman represents the
struggle between light and darkness.
The spiritual essence of Agur-Mazda first of all
consists of a perfect cognition, i.e. a correct distinction between the good
and the evil, or, as it is often expressed – between the truth and deceit.
Through this capacity, it prevails against the evil, the weakness of which is
depicted as a conflict and self-deception. Three concepts:
sanctity, purity and justice form an indivisible unity in Avesta.
There was a considerable overlapping of different
cultures in Turkestan, and some remains of
nomadic ethics have Shamanism
as its foundation. A shaman is an intermediary between our world
and the world of spirits. Everything in nature has a spiritual, higher-level analog.
The basic system of this practice fits natural cycles of nature.
The cult of nature (and it is confirmed by the
development of modern nature protection activity) was more often the cult of
those natural resources and phenomena, which had the greatest value for the
life of that or other tribe or several tribes.
The attitude to sacred tracts and certain types of
plants and animals respected by some peoples was determined by a complex system
of taboos and prohibitions, representing an ancient way of regulating the
relationships between people and nature.
The “Ziyif-al-Kulub” work (1603) gives a rather
detailed description of pagan heathen of the Kyrgyzs (but-khana).
It was a tree, on which the idols made of wood and a stone were hanged out. The
most esteemed and largest of them was made of silver.
In total two thousand idols were supposedly placed on the tree. Worshipping the
tree, the Kyrgyzs resorted to the idols in case of different needs and, in particular,
to heal ill people. At that time the Kyrgyzs made sacrifices. The idols were
offered a small slice from each part of sacrificial meat.
Summarizing the above mentioned, it is necessary to
keep in mind that the ethical structures do not represent something monolithic
and uniform. Frequently the human’s
consciousness is mosaic and oddly integrates interwoven structures of different
ethical traditions. Thus, according to
an Italian philosopher, a nunciate of practical history Antonio Gramshi:
“According to his worldview the man always belongs to a certain grouping, in particular
to the one which integrates all social elements, sharing his way of thinking
and acting. When the worldview is not
critical and consistent, but incidental and incoherent, the man simultaneously
belongs to numerous people-masses, and his own individuality is oddly mixed: it
unifies the elements, making him related to the troglodyte, and principles of
the newest and advanced science, relics of all local historical phases buried
in the past, and intuitive nucleuses of the future philosophy of the internationally
unified mankind. Therefore criticizing
one’s own worldview means to strengthen its unity, consistency and bring it up
to the level reached by the most advanced idea of the world”[1].
In this light the question about how to create a new
ethics and which place in this process will belong to the education becomes
extremely important. It is necessary
that the decision making process takes into account the component of
sustainability, that a language is formed with the help of which the people can
understand that everything I do today will be reflected not only in tomorrow's
situations, but also on the day after tomorrow’s situations, that the economy
becomes environmentally sensitive, that the understanding is developed that we
cannot live without the living substance. The cultures dominating today have formed
“the language of nature consumption”, and there is no “language of conservation”.
And under such circumstances environmental
education can act as a symbol of hope that can help to form this language – the
basis to withhold a new class of problems, i.e. we should be engaged in
creation of a specific “metaphorical space”.
_________________________________________________________________
[1] Gramshi A. Prison Diaries. – M., 1991. Part 1, p. 26.
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