[Marcus Marulus]

I am not sure though that this can be qualified as "paganism". Gaia-worship is just a business of few nutters.

I would call this kind of attitude rather as some perversion of the Christian feeling and attitude to life. One of the central tenets to Christianity is God's saving grace, because of which he incarnated himself in Jesus Christ, who saved humans from the sin through his sacrifice. One of the Christian ideals. practiced throughout centuries, was imitatio Christi, by observing his moral precepts and aspiring to sanctity. Later on, this humble imitation of Christ, turned into something else: there arose an arrogant attitude which claimed that man not only can imitate Christ, but actually that he is able to become Christ and "save the world" by himself, by dispensing of God entirely. Also the hope has been relegated from the hereafter to this world. So man became a god to himself. This arrogant "salvation" is carried out at different levels; by fighting for utopia of universal equality, for "rights", which with time encompass also animals and plants, by striving for the perfect health and environment. In my opinion the modern-day (petit-bourgeois) do-gooderism and feel-goodism comes from this source.

This madness has gone so far as to see keeping or not keeping its precepts within the categories of good and evil. If you don't throw your bottle into a container specially designed for the recycling of glass, you are somehow evil and should have remorse for that, because you refuse to participate in the "salvation" of the world.

So when I see hysterical protesters for "rights" of seals or of the trees of the Amazon rainforest or for recycling, I rather think of them as of some degenerated offshots of Christianity and its worldview, no matter how rabidly atheist most of them declare themselves to be.

Some self-appointed Christian moralizers who point at such phenomena as to some revival of paganism and the cult of Gaia or whatever, are hitting the wrong target. Ancient pagans were not interested in "saving the world" or in "rights of the trees".