Reading the material from Chapter I of the Anthology, several of the articles really stood out for me. I have long been interested in religion and its co-existence with nature and the universe. On that basis I have chosen one such article to clarify and discuss here, The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion by Mircea Eliade. Mircea Eliade's viewpoints have come under heavy scrutiny because of a suspected leaning towards fascism. But for this reading, I kept his possible political leanings aside and just concentrated on his article.
Eliade is of the view that nature is never really natural, it is always fraught with some religious notion. Eliade starts his survey with the sky, claiming that our experience of it is necessarily religious, because when we contemplate it, the sky appears to us as 'wholly other'. For example, he states that the infinite height of the sky suggests transcendance. Many religions had their supreme god dwelling in the sky, with a name that reflected......
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