Reed Ruddy The New World as New Creation

As I was reading through chapter one of Making Nature Sacred I kept thinking about how it must have felt to be someplace no one has ever been before and to experience true wilderness. Throughout the chapter religion is referenced and found within nature and I thought it was interesting how when people find themselves in a situation they cannot understand or have never encountered before it becomes more significant than past experiences that were not original. This thought led me to wonder if the lack of true 'wilderness' in today's society is partially to blame for the considerably larger atheist community in the world today. It makes sense to me that as people begin to believe they understand more and more things, they find fewer and fewer things they need to justify with religion. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing is another discussion, but I can't help but believe that so long as wilderness exists an explanation is needed and religion is consistently there to fill the void. This leads to another thought that perhaps religion as it used to be understood ( as an explanation for the unexplainable) might be the wrong perception of religion itself. I don't know exactly how far I will end up developing this thought, but I will definitely continue it in my next blog.