Traditional Views of Nature - Essay Example

An example of traditional religion that shows great reverence to nature would be Shintoism. Shintoism is a religious form of nature worship that originated from Japan. The fundamental belief of Shintoism holds that the nature deities created the world and that everything, animate and inanimate objects, has a spiritual essence residing in them. The spirits within are said to be part of or created by the gods of nature. This would result in the belief that respecting the environment would mean reverence to the gods, while disrespect would mean dishonor to the deities.

In philosophy, there is the idea of pantheism. Pantheism is the idea that everything is a part of the divine and that all things are extensions of the divine. This notion is shared by many ancient philosophies from Western and Eastern cultures. This relates to the fact that ancient cultures view nature as the way it is because the universe is moved by divine forces. For pantheism, everything in this world is an integral and unified extension of the divine in the cosmos.