Go Golden

Applying a Universal Religious Teaching and the Ethics of Permaculture to Create a Sustainable, Just, Happier Society

Dillon Naber Cruz

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532662065
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ecología

Symptoms of broken systems are all around us, due to our over-consumptive lifestyles, nearly unfettered capitalism, failure to live peaceably together, and the societal dismissal of nature's limits. Climate change is our new reality, and we must respond to that immediately. Fortunately, the world's faith traditions in general--and Christianity specifically--have given us a spiritual path to follow that can alleviate these problems. When the golden rule is coupled with the ethics and principles of permaculture in theory and in practice, then humanity and the diversity of other species can harmoniously thrive together. Go Golden, like a weather vane, points the reader towards the path forward.

1.

Go Golden

An Introduction

Much has been written by people, ranging from scientists to advertisers, about the importance of people “Going Green” to stave off the effects of global climate change, the potentials of which are downright scary, and to conserve the ever-dwindling supplies of fossil fuels as well as other natural resources that all life depends upon. Oftentimes a marketing department’s or advertiser’s idea of “Going Green” is little more than an intentional attempt to deceive their customers into buying something that is only slightly less harmful to the environment than their other products or an attempt to stand out from their competition. Others use these techniques simply as a way to justify consumerism of a different type, convincing customers that they can still shop all that they want to and be guilt free. At other times, it is simply “Green Washing,” using verbiage, packaging, and other marketing tricks meant to fool the buyer into buying a product that is anything but “Green.”

There is no doubt in my mind that the overwhelming majority of scientists who are giving us their dire warnings about the ecological health of this planet’s biosphere are absolutely correct.1 The Good Ship Earth is indeed sailing towards a proverbial iceberg capable of bringing it and its human passengers down like the Titanic, only without the benefit of lifeboats. There is no Planet B. Scientists have been warning political leaders2 and the general public that sea levels will rise and extreme weather events such as prolonged droughts, more frequent wildfires, excessive heat or cold, increased numbers and more intense hurricanes, tornado outbreaks, and monsoon-like rainfall events that cause widespread flooding,3 will become much more prevalent and will negatively affect agricultural yields, subsume small island nations, and make other countries nearly uninhabitable due to extreme heat or cold. Yet there are things that can and must be done to reverse the course of our planetary ship, which is being captained by an ostensibly intelligent and reasonably sane humanity, if we but apply ourselves to solving the problems with the alacrity that the magnitude that the climate change issues warrant. Each of us as individuals, particularly those of us in wealthy nations, can start by seeing the ways in which our actions affect people both near to us and those across the oceans. It is our actions which determine our treatment of people whether they live near to us or far away.

Imagine a world where The Golden Rule was applied as a matter of course in all aspects of life, where every decision we as individuals and as a society was run through the rubric of the Golden Rule before it was made and implemented. How remarkably different the planet would look and feel for billions of people and other forms of life, many of which humanity counts on for survival. I believe that nearly, if not all, aspects of modern life would be changed for the better if we collectively agreed to this principle and then took such an action. I hope to elucidate just such a vision within these pages, and by so doing, bring forth some light into previously dark places. As a culturally Christian person on a journey to know the Creator through the teachings of a well-known Galilean shaman4, I want to more fully become this change, live this change, and inspire this change that I wish to see in the world.

There is a certain amount of back story, personal, geopolitical, historical, and ecological that must needs be presented in order to make that illumination possible. First, I feel it imperative to state upfront, that I am most likely not going to say anything that is wholly “new,” though the overarching message may be. It may be new to the reader but the thoughts, ideas, and information, be it historical or ecological, will generally speaking have origins elsewhere. I am merely attempting to compile data to support my thesis which is that applying the Golden Rule and by extension, the greatest commandment5, as a matter of course will make the planet more habitable, sustainable, just, happy, and pleasant for all concerned. With that caveat in mind, I will make my case for “Going Golden.”

I am doubtless not the only person to ever come to the conclusion that the Golden Rule’s broad application would be of great benefit to humanity. That said, my road to getting to that point is unique because, as is true for everyone, I experience the world from a perspective that is uniquely my own. A wise woman once told me, in response to my angst over experiencing a spiritual practice in a far different way than anything I had read about, that, “1000 people could walk down Prince Street at exactly the same time and each one will have a different experience.” My unique perspective is shaped by my social location, a term used by theologians, pastors, biblical scholars, sociologists, and others as a means of identifying the lens through which we see the world, engage people, and do academic work. Briefly then, my social location is a white American male, in my mid-40s, in the working-class tax bracket, with both a bachelor’s degree in history from a state university, and a M.A. in religion from a progressive United Church of Christ Seminary. Additionally, I am heterosexual, have been married more than once, and am a member of a theologically and socially progressive mainline Protestant church. I am paying a mortgage on our first home, and am a disabled veteran, living in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. All of these things shape the perspective through which I see the world.

From childhood through early adulthood and into my 30s, I was a practicing Christian of the fundamentalist Southern Baptist variety whose theological views were mixed with conservative Church of Christ doctrine taught me by well meaning, though theologically unschooled, grandparents. That said, I was not a very good Christian, at least according to my own guilty feelings for sins of omission or commission, whether they were real or imagined, and based on the harsh judgments of others who were quick to point out my failings in sin management. These doctrinal teachings and the resultant guilt, fed by a hell-based fear that created a traumatizing theological view, and thoughts of sinfulness still shape me in terms of being “embedded theologies” that can creep into my thought processes and generate further questions about my spiritual and world view.6 In the early part of this century, I began to have serious questions about the Southern Baptist beliefs I had been living within for so long and was teetering on losing my religion completely. My now ex-wife, whom I will call “Amanda” for purposes of anonymity, at that time was an active duty chaplain in the U.S Army, and I was a non-traditional student using my veteran’s benefits to work towards a degree in history while also being a stay-at-home dad. The collegiate studies I was then involved in began to seriously undermine my previously narrow-minded notions of how the world works, who the good guys are, and the idea that there is only one right way to live if one wanted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven after shedding one’s mortal coil. Theologically speaking, everything that I had been taught was geared towards the afterlife rather than the here and now, where people are actively suffering. The questioning that arose within my brain as I began to apply the critical thinking skills I had gained during my undergraduate studies from learning to do historical analysis, the academic study of literature, and the occasional classroom debate was seriously confusing to one who had been indoctrinated to think in the impossibly strict binary terms of black and white regarding life as a Christian American fundamentalist.

Amanda was concerned by my new found questioning but assured me that it was only a phase that many Christians go through when going pursuing higher education and that it would pass in time and then my faith would be renewed. The problem arose however, that the more I learned as a student of history, the more I saw that both the fundamentalist Christian doctrines and patriotic rhetoric I had believed for so long were incongruent in many cases with the actual actions engaged in by self-proclaimed Christians and the U.S. as a national entity. The teachings of Jesus were either ignored or glossed over completely as spiritual notions for the afterlife in many instances in favor of a doctrine that reflects the conflation of Christianity with Empire that began in the fourth century when Constantine put crosses on his banners and went to war.7 My personal Christian theology then began to shift from sin management and the afterlife to become more rooted in what I saw as the essence of Christ’s ethical teachings, his greatest commandment, to love the Creator and to love others as one loves oneself, along with his articulation of the Golden Rule to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”8

The slope got slipperier until I reached a personal breaking point one day in the lead up to the second invasion of Iraq in 2003. I had been attending a Protestant chapel services on the army base regularly despite the confusion swirling in my mind. During the times devoted to prayer requests, chapel members (soldiers and their spouses) would voice their concerns and needs that they wanted prayer for. Multiple times people had asked for a swift victory for America in the event of yet another war with a country far from our shores that was (and is) completely incapable of invading the United States or bombing it into oblivion with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was Empire Christianity pure and simple wedded with runaway American nationalism. Not once did an...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• How to Read This Book
• Chapter 1: Go Golden
• Chapter 2.: Down on the Farm
• Chapter 3: Let’s Go Shopping
• Chapter 4: The Domestic Life
• Chapter 5: Entering a Forbidden Zone
• Chapter 6: War and Peace
• Chapter 7: Permaculture
• Conclusion
• Bibliography