**2. The world's religions**

From a sociological perspective, the ideal type is a tool that is used to measure religious identity and practice. The ideal type is employed to gage how much any given religion conforms to one of four ideals and hence how and/or why it is distinct from the ideal itself as well as how and why a religion has both similarities and differences from another religion. The four ideal types are, essentially in order of their historical precedence, pagan, dharmic, abrahamic and secular. In short, paganism represents primarily the root of religious perception and practice for our planet.4 The dharmic religions grow out of it and do so largely organically and peacefully, but they are nonetheless fundamentally rejecting of the pagan position. The abrahamic also develops out of paganism but more iconoclastically and belligerently. In fact, the abrahamic faiths appear to be more violently opposed to all other religious traditions—a hostility that even extends among and between its own constituent factions. The irony for our world today, in effect, is that the planet's future precariously hangs increasingly on the clash between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic world and/or potential caliphate centred on the Middle East. The secular traditions grow largely out of the abrahamic but have affinities nonetheless with both pagan and dharmic matrixes. The secular, however, often continues the antagonism of its abrahamic predecessor towards other 'faith' positions—such as the enmity against religion to be seen in much scientistic rationalism or the aggression of Marxist communism.5 Violence, however, is an unfortunate feature of all religion. The pagan empires of the past were certainly no less brutal and cruel than we have continued to see among human behaviour throughout successive chapters of human history. Hindu fundamentalism in the name of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Vishna Janata Party (VJP), the Tamil Tigers, etc. has deflated the illusion of proverbial Hindu tolerance and gentleness. And the imperial expansions of Ashoka or the internecine conflicts of both medieval and modern Tibet suggest among other events that the same can appear within Buddhism. Consequently, one notion to keep in mind within the study of religions is to what degree is violent behaviour that leads to bloodshed and carnage an intrinsic or extrinsic feature of any particular religion or religious tradition.

The religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam come under the rubric of the abrahamic tradition, that is, those faiths that claim descent from the biblical patriarch Abraham. These are also known as the three 'religions of the Book'. Judaism divides between the factions of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and, in Britain, Liberal.

<sup>4</sup> York [3].

<sup>5</sup> E.g., Dawkins [4], Marx [5], Greenfeld & Chirot [6].

Christianity is likewise fissured between Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant and Mormon branches; and Islam is known through its Sunni, Shia and Sufi forms. Each of these sub-divides even further, whether officially or schismatically, and Protestant Christianity alone is one of the more complex in terms of proliferating a plethora of competing forms. Among the dharmic religions, we have the Hindu sects of Shaivism, Vaishnavism and Shaktism, and in Buddhism, there are both Theravada and Mahayana, or even Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana, branches.


Besides the religious ideals of abrahamic, dharmic, secular and pagan, there is an important spiritual divide that distinguishes religions from each other that may even be present within a specific religious type itself. This division conforms more to a classification rather than as an instrument for phenomenal investigation, namely gnostic understandings vis-à-vis telluric comprehensions. Consequently, a schema for presenting the four ideal-type world-religious traditions is the following:


The 'cosmically exclusive'signals the rejection of one of the possible components of existential being: the world, the supernatural, the human. By converse, 'cosmically inclusive' is the position in which all three components are accepted as existents. Most religion attempts to grapple with questions of cosmology and cosmogony. And how we understand religions, whether they are telluric or gnostic, is through how they picture the origins (and, hence, consequences) of the cosmos. Positions that start with the transcendent, some sort of being, entity or force that is outside space and time are gnostic. Those that are inherently immanent, that begin with the tangible, with the world rather than the supernatural, are telluric. Putting aside for now the philosophical question that arises if and when we wish to consider the human (rather than either the material or the supernatural) as originator, namely the implications of the anthropic principle, the telluric worldview/cosmos is one which emerges from the bodily rather than the transcendental. If there is one telluric characteristic that is representative and definitive over all others, I would designate it as corpo-spirituality<sup>6</sup> or, to use a term I heard during the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religions by Florida State University's Michael Pasquier speaking on 'Our Lady of

<sup>6</sup> York [3] & York [7].

#### *Religion and the Environmental Crisis DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104002*

Tickfaw', 'corpo-centricity'. The very notion of physical spirituality is difficult to grasp for anyone of a transcendental or gnostic inclination or acculturation, but it is arguable that the tangible as inherently sacred, the world as divine immanence and the consequences of this-worldly emphasis that derives from it are *prima inter pares* qualities of pagan religiosity.

Moreover, both gnostic and telluric spirituality frequently entertain the concept of reincarnation. But the purposes behind rebirth are radically different. The gnostic will seek eventually to break the chain of rebirth. Life on earth is only a school and preparation for the 'higher' life to come. The earth-oriented position, by contrast, welcomes rebirth as providing the opportunity to celebrate yet again the pleasures and joys and growths of life.

Though the divide between gnostic and telluric considerations is strongest perhaps within pagan religiosities—Platonic, Neo-platonic, Cabbalistic and/or panentheistic for the former; immanent, numinously materialistic, animistic, pantheistic, secular and atheistic for the latter, we find similarities as well with the other ideal types of religion. For instance, while the secular position is usually this-worldly and materialistic, some secular religiosities are astral and deny the existence of the supernatural, that is, they have no consideration of a supernatural horizon. The entire cosmos is comprised by the space-time continuum. Deities are substituted by extraterrestrials. Technology replaces magic or any sort of *extra-totum* intervention. Suggested examples of secular spiritualities that find value more aligned with outer space than with our terrestrial world possibly include the Canadian-French UFO group known as the Raëlians, L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, some of the other flying saucer cults and the England-based Cometan's Astronism. Typically, for the followers of Raël, the universe has no beginning and also no end. It just is. And it is also some kind of cosmic machine. There is no spirit or deity that animates it.

While dharmic religions are essentially gnostic in their aspiration to escape permanently from a perceived cycle of rebirth, the theological position of Theravada Buddhism and Kapila's Sankhya school of Hinduism (as well as the Yoga school of Patañjali that derives from it) in which instead of the standard monism of Hinduism there is instead postulated to be *two* absolute realities: matter (*prakriti*) and self (*purusha*)—each eternal, independent and infinite. *Moksha*, accordingly, lies in recognising the utter separateness of the two. In addition, despite Plato's nominal opposition to Gnosticism and Christianity's similar stance, there is world rejection at the heart of Christian religion. Nevertheless, Matthew Fox's Creation Spirituality ('green' theology) and Unitarian Universalism (including its Pagan and Earth-centred Spirituality organisation of CUUPS) exhibit a more telluric orientation. While Islam is focused primarily on attainment of Allah's heaven, the consideration that the earth is the gift and creation of God allows a non-gnostic tenor to Islam itself. Perhaps of all the Abrahamic religions, despite its transcendental Creator, it is Judaism that retains this-worldly values the foremost.

Once again, while gnostic and telluric principles embody the chief distinction with the two different moral and behavioural standards of spirituality, a blurring of this fundamental divergence is nevertheless to be found across the religious spectrum. A further consideration in regard to the world's religions is to be discerned from David Barrett's *Christian Encyclopedia* for the following calculations. These are, of course, rough estimates at best—though they remain ones that give us some idea of the distribution of the world's religions themselves. Moreover, despite the intention of Barrett to provide a manual for Christian missionary undertakings, his volume furnishes us perhaps the best and most accurate picture of the global religious situation.

If we look at the world as a whole, essentially one-third is to be identified as Christian—two-thirds of which are Roman Catholic; one-third being both Protestant and Eastern Orthodox. The next largest block had been the secularists representing something slightly over one-fifth of the planet's population when calculating from William [8] figures. Although Barrett has released a 2001 update of his survey, the percentages of the world's religions remain essentially the same, although the secular traditions may have declined to something closer to 16% according to the Pew Research Center statistics for 2020. These technically non-spiritual traditions comprise both the legacy of secular humanism in the West and, more significantly, the influence of Marxist communism throughout the world. About 12% of the world is Hindu (though Pew puts this now at 15.6%) and another 6% is Buddhist—bringing the dharmic position to something just under one-fifth of the planet. The aggregate Muslim community had been closer to the size of the secularists than it was to the dharmists, but it has grown the most of any religious tradition and now stands at approximately 24.9%. This means that roughly a full half of planet earth if not more adheres to an abrahamic position of one sort or another. Of the world's major religious traditions, therefore, the pagan is by far the smallest—comprising essentially between 5 and 10% of planet Earth's human population. The bulk of this number comes from the folk religious practices of the Chinese. Of the remaining religious persuasions for the planet, approximately 2% are to be classified as new religions—chiefly to be found in Asia and Africa. Many if not most of these would approximate the abrahamist position over any other. Consequently, all the remaining world religions, namely Judaism (an abrahamic faith), Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Baha'i, *all together* constitute *less* than 1% of the world's population.

### **3. The environmental crisis**

There is no question that with the spiralling increase in human population and the consequences of industrial befouling of air, water and land; corporate farming and large-scale agriculture; planned obsolescence for marketing purposes; unsolved difficulties with waste disposal; mass starvation and uncontrolled migration; continuing loss and reduction of wildlife and biodiversity; and social collapse, over-policing, war and terrorism, human society itself is in peril—one that is accompanied by global warming, light pollution and the proliferation of space debris. The question before human society concerns whether the preservation or restoration of the natural

*Religion and the Environmental Crisis DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104002*

environmental balance of our host planet is to be or even can be augmented by religion, or, instead, how much of a role does religion—or do the religions—play in fomenting the problem in the first place?

As Associate Professors (respectively, Indiana University and the National University of Singapore) Lisa Sideris and John Whalen-Bridge explain, the Anthropocene period and the 'Great Acceleration' refer to the intensification of human activity through 'population growth, energy consumption, telecommunications, transportation, deforestation, pollution, and water use [that] began perceptively to shift the state and functioning of the Earth system. … Anthropocene discourse … taps into millenarian hopes and fears, and [it] draws from ancient reservoirs of prophecy, theodicy, and eschatology'. <sup>7</sup> The consequences of the Great Acceleration are the deadly floods, wildfires, drought and rising sea levels that are being increasingly witnessed ubiquitously. The physicist Harold Schilling argues that the

*pollution and destruction of [the] environment are religious and ethical problems that derive basically from irreverent and immoral attitudes toward nature, rather than from technological inadequacy alone.<sup>8</sup>*

As Westminster College (Fulton, Missouri) Professor William Young asks, in considering that the fundamental ethical issue of the contemporary world is the wellbeing of the planet as a whole, '[does] the ecological crisis demonstrate a fundamental failure of the world's religions to follow their own teachings?' <sup>9</sup> Our specific interest here concerning the crisis is climate change.
