Word: worshiper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course, this anthropocentrism runs against the grain of a contemporary environmentalism that indulges in earth worship to the point of idolatry. One scientific theory -- Gaia theory -- actually claims that Earth is a living organism. This kind of environmentalism likes to consider itself spiritual. It is nothing more than sentimental. It takes, for example, a highly selective view of the benignity of nature. My nature worship stops with the April twister that came through Andover, Kans., or the May cyclone that killed more than 125,000 Bengalis and left 10 million (!) homeless...
What more seductive place to locate a story about love and other disasters? The city has its irresistible charms: 18th century architecture, a dashing 19th century history and old families that have been likened to the ancient Chinese because they eat rice, drink tea and worship their ancestors. Minutes away are the Sea Islands, where the area's oversupply of physicians and lawyers spend languorous weekends gunking around in their Boston Whalers, sipping beer and picking crab...
Though such ancient goddesses as Isis or Astarte are often invoked, most worship occurs in the name of a vague generic "Goddess," often depicted as Mother Earth or Gaia in line with environmental awareness. "The Goddess is not just the female version of God. She represents a different concept," says Merlin Stone, author of When God Was a Woman. While the Judeo-Christian God is transcendent, the Goddess is located "within each individual and all things in nature," she says...
Movement advocates say Goddess worship restores a prehistoric belief that was eradicated in Europe and the Middle East around 6,000 years ago by patriarchal invaders. The prepatriarchal utopia is portrayed as egalitarian, peace loving and "gynocentric." New scholarly backing for the creed comes from archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in The Language of the Goddess (Harper & Row) and the forthcoming Civilization of the Goddess. The author contends that worship of the "Old European Great Goddess" goes back to 25,000 B.C., though Gimbutas' major evidence stems from farming cultures in southeastern Europe from 6500 B.C. on, especially their ubiquitous female statuettes...
There are numerous skeptics, including female religious thinkers. Carole Fontaine of Andover Newton Theological School, for one, complains that feminist writers delete historical evidence that is "embarrassing or contradictory." Carol Meyers of Duke University argues that there is no proof that the figurines cited by Gimbutas were objects of worship, much less representations of a single Goddess. None of that, however, has deterred adherents. Whether they are reviving a vanished faith or inventing a new one, it is the gender of the deity that counts...