The worship of the environment as interpretted by Cronon serves many similarities with that of the story of the Bible. A dualism of good and evil shows presence on page 9 when Cronon states "wilderness had once been the antithesis of all that was orderly and good-it had been the darkness, one might say,, on the far side of the garden wall." Is Cronon simply speaking about a garden in nature, or was it the Garden of eden that seperated Adam and Eve from evil, "the far side of the garden wall". Also, on page 8, Cronan tells about how John Muir uses metaphor to compare the Best fruit of Eden goin to waste to the water and scenery of Tulumne going to waste.
Furthermore Cronon's description of the sublime, being older and more pervasive, and the frontier being newer and romantic bears stricking resemblence to the Old and the New Testament of the Bible. Is this all coincidence?
Further reading continues to bring more and more comparisons to Wilderness being part of Religious belief. God created man in his own image, and, according to Cronon, on page 10 in the first paragraph, the Europeans and Americans converged to remake wilderness in their "own image".
"God was on a mountaintop, in a chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in the sunset." ..... Immediately following at the bottom of page 10, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and other great areas of "wilderness" fall under the same comparisons. Contemporary christian band, Hillsong United, seems to feel the same way. This is evident in one of their hit songs titled "Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble?" A link to the lyrics to this song: www.delirious.org.uk/lyrics/didyoufeel.html
Some of the lines included in the song are :
Did you feel the mountains tremble
Did you hear the oceans roar
When the people rose to sing of
Jesus Christ the chosen one....
In prelude, which is included in the reading by Cronon, there are many metaphors relating wilderness to religion :
"The immeasurable height can be interpreted as being Heaven"
"The Rocks that muttered close upon our ears": This is a second example of the similarities to the lyrics of the song above by Hillsong United.
"The Prelude", which contains lines that in a literal sense talks about wilderness and nature, contains metaphors that includes the same words used to describe nature as almost a summary of the Bible. Genesis can be thought of when "all like workings of one mind" is stated which is no different that the concept of the Holy Trinity:The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost, all in one entity. "The Great Apocalypse" refers to armageddon.
In the book of John, chapter 3, verse 16, the bible says " For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son and whosoever beliveth in him shall not parish but have everlasting life. ... Not much different that what Cronan speaks about on the second to last paragraph of page 12 when he says " No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future.
In the last paragraph of page 12, Cronon mentions 3 men who express their piety in 3 different ways. The Bible tells of the 3 Wise Men bringing gifts to Jesus when he was born in 3 different forms. One of gold, one of frankensence, and one of murr.
In a sense of duality, good and evil, human vs. non human, man vs nature, man vs women, whites and colored are evident and expressed as results from radical religious people.
Science vs Religion referred to the Big Outside or as some might better know it " The Big Bang Theory.
