Going back to Nature Worship could be the solution to the present day spread of violence, sometimes aggravated by religious conflicts. We can worship nature, not in the way it was interpreted by our early anthropologists, but the way we worship our parents and our gurus. Then we can still adhere to our faith, be it Buddha Dhamma, Hindu Dhamma, Christianity or Islam, without any conflict within ourselves, or in the society, while also worshipping nature.
In the beginning there would have been only nature worship, with Mother Earth as the Mother Goddess. The Great Mother was the Mother of all life in our solar system.
On Mother Earth, human beings would have been totally non-violent. Since the female was the life giving principle, and she gathered the food for her family and was closer to nature, they worshipped the feminine. It is only when man tasted carrion, probably during a famine, that he got a liking for it and began to kill animals for his food. The killing brought out the violence and sadistic nature in man. When he became the provider, he also took control of the family, and with his aggressive nature, he set aside the passive, non-violent female deities with powerful, violent and aggressive male deities.
The new male dominated religions, even though all of them professed peace and co-existence, and the gods were all said to be benevolent, later interpretations resulted in conflicts and competition, and the ruling classes exploited them to gain more and more power and wealth, by inciting brother against brother for the love of god.
When we worship the sky, the sun, the moon and the stars, when we worship rain and the rivers, the trees and the mountains, we do not have to fight with each other because all nature belongs to all of us and we belong to nature. We are all children of Mother Earth, in addition to being the children of God, or Brahma, if we wish to believe.
The water flowing down a river does not discriminate between man and animal, or among men of different races, creeds or castes. The light from the sun falls down on all of us. None of us can claim the sun belongs to us, and not to other people on earth. Then there would not be any necessity to fight each other for the possession of our sacred object. There would not be any necessity to convert a person from one form of worship to another.
If a man can use an axe to cut down a tree, it would not be difficult for him to use the same axe to cut down a fellow human being. He would not do that if he considered the tree as sacred. Man would not pollute a river if he held her sacred.
One more reason we have to go back to nature worship, specially the worship of Mother Earth, is because it has now been accepted by many scientists, that Mother Earth is a living goddess.
Gaia was the name given by the Greeks to Mother Earth. Today people are reluctant to accept that Earth Mother could be a living organism, because then they have to accept that they are molesting, violating, abusing and torturing someone alive.
Gaia is sick, and dying. She would have self diagnosed the sickness as cancer. It would be in her interest and instinct for survival to destroy and eliminate the cancer cells completely. The cancer cells are mankind, which are spreading all over the world, destroying all other living organisms. Either man has to control himself, and stop all destruction, beginning with destroying his own species, or let Gaia destroy the entire human race. The only way to stop this destruction is by worshipping Gaia as we would our own mother, and worshipping all other natural forces.
Lynn Margulis talks about endosymbiosis as the most likely explanation of the origin and evolution of life on the planet we know as Earth. We have to get out of our anthropocentric mindset, that man is superior to all other life and we are the masters of the universe. In reality, we do not exist as separate entities, but we only co-exist with around 30 billion other life forms including the bacteria and virus forms.
We do not know if Lovelock and Margulis had studied the teachings on Paticca
Samuppada, or the Law of Dependent Origination. "The causal interdependence applies to all things from the natural environment, which is an external, physical condition, to the events of human society, ethical principles, life events and the happiness and suffering which manifest in our own minds."
One thing we have to be very careful is never to let nature worship be institutionalized. This could once again lead to allegiances, loyalties, conflicts, divisions, and we could get back full circle to a new segment involved in religious conflict. As an example if we are to worship the moon, let us not argue or begin to fight who is on the moon, a man, a rabbit, or a duck.
The Romans worshipped the two faced god Janus. His temple doors were open in times of war, and closed when there was peace. Let us get together to close and seal the doors of the Janus temple forever, so that it will crumble into dust and disappear from the face of Mother Earth someday. Why I am not suggesting that we destroy the Janus temple is because it would be another act of violence, and we need not resort to violence even against any person or object, for time and nature will take care of it.