If you owe $50, you're a delinquent account. If you owe $50,000, you're a small businessmen. If you owe $50 million, you're a corporation. If you owe $50 billion, you're the government.
Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that both science and technology are insufficient for resolving ecological issues because they are influenced by religious attitudes toward nature.
Lynn Townsend White, Jr. argues that our current scientific and technological approaches to addressing the ecological crisis are deeply influenced by orthodox Christian values, which dominate our understanding of nature. He asserts that since the origins of our environmental problems are largely rooted in these religious beliefs, any viable solutions must also address and fundamentally rethink our spiritual relationship with nature and our place within it, emphasizing the need for a profound shift in perception and feeling towards the natural world.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a seminar on environmental ethics, this quote emphasizes the need to reassess our values related to nature.
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But I deny that the Constitution recognizes property in man.
Male and female have the power to fuse into one solid, both because both are nourished in both and also because soul is the same thing in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.
It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.
So, you are very welcome to our house. It must appear in other ways than words, Therefore, I scant this breathing courtesy.
We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.
His (Christ's) appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.