Hello and welcome to this Special Edition of Street Prophets.
This is an invitation to you to share your words which will be shared at NN13 through the Interfaith Service:
From ramara:
Religion, Belief Systems, Nature, Science: Contributions Wanted for NN 13 Sunday Service
For the past few years, loggersbrat and I have been organizing the Sunday morning interfaith service at Netroots Nation. The service is open to everyone, of all faiths and of no faith. Some of us find it a centering after such a full conference, some use it to fix their resolve to work for change, some for a sense of communal meditation and affirmation. Each year we have chosen a theme and asked the community for their thoughts and inspiration on that theme.This years theme:
I have been thinking about a theme for the NN13 Sunday Service, and I wondered about doing something about belief and nature, belief and science.
As far as I can tell, science and religion began as our attempt to learn about and have some effect on our world; for a long time they were the same thing. The divergence came only a few hundred years ago for the west; I don't know enough about eastern religions. But in this country the religious right (and perhaps other fundamentalist versions of faith) lead to a general feeling that religion is opposed to science, and this perhaps has encouraged the fundamentalist version of atheism.In any event, the idea of learning about the world and the universe, to understand as much as we can about them, and to take better care of them, are deeply felt by some to be religious values. So I was thinking about asking people for ideas from their belief systems about our relation to nature, and our duty to nature, both in terms of understanding and conserving. Scientists like Newton and Darwin were deeply religious, and Einstein was spiritual in his ideas about harmony in the universe.
Another side of the issue is ethics. Technology in these days tends to develop faster than we are able to consider its ethical application, which leads to such things as atomic weapons, genetically modified foods, lots of other genetic concerns, matters like biological and chemical weapons, etc.
This is kind of free associating, but I would like to hear what everyone working on the service thinks about the general theme, other suggestions, and your own associations if we take this theme and ask for contributions from others.
It's a (fairly loose) starting point.
