Nature May Have A Profound Effect On Our Religiosity

[afleitch]

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/08/20/432911010/nature-may-have-a-profound-effect-on-our-religiosity.

"In U.S. counties with warm winters, temperate summers and beautiful natural resources — like beaches, lakes, hills or mountains — people's rates of affiliation with religious organizations are lower than in other places, according to a new study.

The study's authors, Todd W. Ferguson and Jeffrey A. Tamburello of Baylor University, write in the journal Sociology of Religion: "Natural amenities can be considered as a resource for spirituality that has the power to satisfy some people's need for inspiration, awe and divine connection ... When a person hikes in a forest to connect with the sacred, she or he may not feel the need to affiliate with a religious organization because her or his spiritual demands are met."

---

I can relate to this actually, anecdotally. I'm lucky to live in a place where wilderness is 20 minutes away and it's just astounding how much it inspires.

[afleitch]

Are you all just reading what you want to read?

[afleitch]

We find deserts and forests, rivers and lakes, mountains and fens all beautiful despite the fact they have nothing in common.

And notions of beauty have not stayed constant. Until Romanticism happened and made everyone see sense, a beautiful landscape (at least to a member of the educated classes) was a prosperous agricultural one of the sort turned into weird sub-Classical fetish by Claude Lorrain: most of the landscapes that we particularly value today were routinely dismissed as 'waste'.

How beauty is 'assembled' may not stay constant, but notions of beauty certainly in the natural world have remained constant. Flowers have always been beautiful and happen to be found in the earliest, pre Homo Sapiens graves. We have 'evolved' to find them beautiful. Whether one likes wildflowers or a poinsettia, we've always found flowers beautiful.