To Worship the Elements

Religious conflict feels unholy to me. That is to say untrue and disrespectful, in my gut, prior and anterior to any religious labels I would adopt for myself or argue in favor of. 

Debate itself isn't conflict, and to confuse debate with conflict can undermine loving, level-headed, fruitful dialogue. Yet, caution, circumspection, and compassion ought remain paramount in exchanges that touch the core of identity, loyalty, and the things to which humans attach their deepest hopes and allegiances. To keep them so allows us to reach a higher potential as human beings. 

In that spirit, I deleted the interview in the previous post because it was more academic in style and didn't match the compassion-centered style I hope to characterize this blog. I also offer this prayer before getting to the substance of this post:

Prayer to Mother Vesta for the well-being of all Christians, in the past, present, and future, of all places, that they may have had, have, or will have peace and rest in their hearts, physical well being, from birth to death, and that they have been, are, or will be received by others with compassion and friendliness. May this blog always be, and may I always be, a safe harbor for Christians.

In the previous post on Saint Daria, Crisaunt first says paganism is idolatry. Daria responds that paganism is worship of the personified elements. Crisaunt offers an argument against this in return, that the earth gives to the farmer, but not to the supplicant who regards the earth as a deity. Daria finds this persuasive and converts to Christianity. 

Emperor Julian, in his writings, offers a kind of rebuttal to Crisaunt's argument in a letter apparently to Christians in Alexandria, Egypt:

The particular favors conferred on your city by the Olympic gods were, in short, such as these. Many more, not to be prolix, I omit. But those blessings which the apparent gods bestow in common every day, not on one family, nor on a single city, but on the whole world, why do you not acknowledge? Are you alone insensible of the sun? Are you alone ignorant that summer and winter are produced by him, and that all things are alone vivified and alone germinate from him? Do you not, also, perceive the great advantages that accrue to your city from the moon, from him and by him the fabricator of all things? Yet you dare not worship either of these deities; but [...], whom neither you nor your fathers have seen, you think must necessarily be God the word, while him, whom from eternity every generation of mankind has seen, and see and venerates, and by venerating lives happily, I mean the mighty sun, a living animated intellectual, and beneficent image of the intelligible Father, you despise. If, however, you listen to my admonitions, you will by degrees return to the truth. You will not wander from the right path, if you will be guided by him, who to the twentieth year of his age pursued that road, but has now worshiped the gods for near twelve years. 

From, Arguments of Celsus, Porphyry, and The Emperor Julian, Against the Christians, by Thomas Taylor, pages 39, 40, published in 1830.

Emperor Julian was raised to be Christian by his mother, but converted to neo-platonic paganism as an adult. 'Prolix' is the antonym of 'brief' or 'concise'.  

This view comports with my own sense of reality, that things within it have a holy--if not unambiguously divine--nature about them, and that whatever supernature there is would be at least closely identified with material reality, somehow forming a coherent whole, not entirely separate and distinct from it, like a crab temporarily inhabiting a shell.