Treat a tiger reasonably...

If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature. The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. 

Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. 
-- G K Chesterton in 'Orthodoxy'

Don't talk damned nonsense!!!

"The other and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely ‘good’ or ‘righteous’, a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another. The first of these views—the one that thinks God beyond good and evil—is called Pantheism. It was held by the great Prussian philosopher Hegel and, as far as I can understand them, by the Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians....You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, ‘If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God.’ The Christian replies, ‘Don’t talk damned nonsense.’* For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again." -- CS Lewis Mere Christianity

Part of Weston's New Age/Pantheistic rant in C S Lewis' 'Perelandra'

Weston looked somewhat taken aback at the interruption & went on. “During my convalescence I had that leisure for reflection which I had denied myself for many years. In particular I reflected on the objections you had felt to that liquidation of the non-human inhabitants of Malacandra which was, of course, the necessary preliminary to its occupation by our own species. The traditional &, if I may say so, the humanitarian form in which you advanced those objections had till then concealed from me their true strength. That strength I now began to perceive. I began to see that my own exclusive devotion to human utility was really based on an unconscious dualism.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that all my life I had been making a wholly unscientific dichotomy or antithesis between Man & Nature -- had conceived myself fighting for Man against his non-human environment. During my illness I plunged into Biology, & particularly into what may be called biological philosophy. Hitherto, as a physicist, I had been content to regard Life as a subject outside my scope. The conflicting views of those who drew a sharp line between the organic & the inorganic & those who held that what we call Life was inherent in matter from the very beginning had not interested me. Now it did. I saw almost at once that I could admit no break, no discontinuity, in the unfolding of the cosmic process. I became a convinced believer in emergent evolution. All is one. The stuff of mind, the unconsciously purposive dynamism, is present from the very beginning.”

            Here he paused. Ransom had heard this sort of thing pretty often before & wondered when his companion was coming to the point. When Weston resumed it was with an even deeper solemnity of tone.

“The majestic spectacle of this blind, inarticulate purposiveness thrusting its way upward & ever upward in an endless unity of differentiated achievements towards an ever-increasing complexity of organisation, towards spontaneity & spirituality, swept away all my old conception of a duty to Man as such. Man in himself is nothing. The forward movements of Life -- the growing spirituality -- is everything. I say to you quite freely, Ransom, that I should have been wrong in liquidating the Malacandrians. It was a mere prejudice that made me prefer our own race to theirs. To spread spirituality, not to spread the human race, is henceforth my mission. This sets the coping-stone on my career. I worked first for myself; then for science; then for humanity; but now at last for Spirit itself -- I might say, borrowing language which will be more familiar to you, the Holy Spirit”

“Now what exactly do you mean by that?” asked Ransom.

“I mean,” said Weston, that nothing now divides you & me except a few outworn theological technicalities with which organised religion has unhappily allowed itself to get encrusted. But I have penetrated that crust. The Meaning beneath it is as true & living as ever. If you will excuse me for putting it that way, the essential truth of the religious view of life finds a remarkable witness in the fact that it enabled you, on Malacandra, to grasp, in your own mythical & imaginative fashion, a truth which was hidden from me.”

“I don’t know much about what people call the religious view of life,” said Ransom, wrinkling his brow. “You see, I’m a Christian. And what we mean by the Holy Ghost is not a blind, inarticulate purposiveness.”

“My dear Ransom,” said Weston, “I understand you perfectly. I have no doubt that my phraseology will seem strange to you, & perhaps even shocking. Early & revered associations may have put it out of your power to recognise in this new form the very same truths which religion has so long preserved & which science is now at last re-discovering. But whether you can see it or not, believe me, we are talking about exactly the same thing.”

“I’m not at all sure that we are.”

“That, if you will permit me to say so, is one of the real weaknesses of organised religion -- that adherence to formulae, the failure to recognise one’s own friends. God is a spirit, Ransom. Get hold of that. You’re familiar with that already. Stick to it. God is a spirit.”

“Well, of course. But what then?”

“What then? Why, spirit -- mind freedom -- spontaneity that’s what I’m talking about. That is the goal towards which the whole cosmic process is moving. The final disengagement of that freedom, that spirituality, is the work to which I dedicate my own life & the life of humanity. The goal, Ransom, the goal: think of it! Pure spirit: the final vortex of self-thinking, self-originating activity.”

“Final?” said Ransom. “You mean it doesn’t yet exist?”

“Ah,” said Weston, “I see what’s bothering you. Of course I know. Religion pictures it as being there from the beginning. But surely that is not a real difference? To make it one, would be to take time too seriously. When it has once been attained, you might then say it had been at the beginning just as well as at the end. Time is one of the things it will transcend.”

“By the way,” said Ransom, “is it in any sense at all personal -- is it alive?”

An indescribable expression passed over Weston’s face. He moved a little nearer to Ransom & began speaking in a lower voice.

“That’s what none of them understand,” he said. It was such a gangster’s or a schoolboy’s whisper & so unlike his usual orotund lecturing style that Ransom for a moment felt a sensation almost of disgust.

“Yes,” said Weston, “I couldn’t have believed, myself, till recently. Not a person, of course. Anthropomorphism is one of the childish diseases of popular religion” (here he had resumed his public manner), “but the opposite extreme of excessive abstraction has perhaps in the aggregate proved more disastrous. Call it a Force. A great, inscrutable Force, pouring up into us from the dark bases of being. A Force that can choose its instruments. It is only lately, Ransom, that I’ve learned from actual experience something which you have believed all your life as part of your religion.” Here he suddenly subsided again into a whisper -- a croaking whisper unlike his usual voice. “Guided,” he said. “Chosen. Guided. I’ve become conscious that I’m a man set apart. Why did I do physics? Why did I discover the Weston rays? Why did I go to Malacandra? It -- the Force -- has pushed me on all the time. I’m being guided. I know now that I am the greatest scientist the world has yet produced. I’ve been made so for a purpose. It is through me that Spirit itself is at this moment pushing on to its goal.” +Isabel Tanaka