Blog Post #11

            I was originally raised with the Presbyterian religion growing up but this only lasted until I was around the age of 7.  After that, my family stopped going to church and religion really stopped playing a part in my life.  I currently don’t identify with any formal religion and I would describe myself as spiritual rather than religious.  Not having a strong religious backing, I’m open to knew ideas and I so found spiritual ecology to be really interesting.  I love that spiritual ecology seems to centered around respecting nature and working with nature, however the rituals described in the readings do seem to be a little far fetched to me.

I’m used to hearing that organisms adapt to their surroundings so it was interesting to hear the theory of co-evolution presented by the Gaia Hypothesis.  I don’t feel like I know enough to say if this hypothesis is right or wrong, but I definitely do think that it is a possibility.  If the Gaia Hypothesis is correct and nature does evolve to help life survive on Earth, this just further stresses the idea that we as humans must show nature the same amount of respect that nature shows us.

I do feel in some ways that our culture is hyper-masculine.  Although exploitation of women does still exist to some degree, I feel that hierarchy and constant competition are the two things that really propel our “hyper-masculine culture”.