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<blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 5339733" data-attributes="member: 15538">I'm not any kind of expert on Easter Island. Thinking about this idea generally, there is what I think of as the &quot;purple Kool-Aid barrier.&quot; There is some level of certainty of belief that I think is just never warranted; the human being is too fragile a vessel to have confidence in any human being's wisdom, even if they are imagined to be interpreting a superhuman level of insight. When the post-moderns declared &quot;ideology is dead&quot; this is the kind of thing they were hoping we had matured past, but of course they were wrong.Heading back more in the direction of the original topic, I think it's a fair point that some cultures have what we would recognize as a sort of ecological awareness, and some don't. It is doubtful the historical druids were especially ecological, although they might&nbsp; have had connections with nature worship. What we do know about them:- The Romans thought they worshipped the Sun, and indicated they thought the Druids practiced human sacrifice- They didn't build stone henges. Although some of them may have been appropriated by druid religionists, my understanding is that for the most part, the locals thought henges had been built by &quot;giants.&quot;- They are probably resonsible for some but not all of the vestigial pagan symbolism present in the British Isles in the middles ages. The symbolism of mistletoe seems to have come from them.- Druid comes from a word that means &quot;tree.&quot; Some sources translate the original form as &quot;oak-knower&quot; or &quot;oak-wise&quot; or something along those lines. The same root gives us &quot;dryad.&quot;</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pawsplay, post: 5339733, member: 15538"] I'm not any kind of expert on Easter Island. Thinking about this idea generally, there is what I think of as the "purple Kool-Aid barrier." There is some level of certainty of belief that I think is just never warranted; the human being is too fragile a vessel to have confidence in any human being's wisdom, even if they are imagined to be interpreting a superhuman level of insight. When the post-moderns declared "ideology is dead" this is the kind of thing they were hoping we had matured past, but of course they were wrong. Heading back more in the direction of the original topic, I think it's a fair point that some cultures have what we would recognize as a sort of ecological awareness, and some don't. It is doubtful the historical druids were especially ecological, although they might have had connections with nature worship. What we do know about them: - The Romans thought they worshipped the Sun, and indicated they thought the Druids practiced human sacrifice - They didn't build stone henges. Although some of them may have been appropriated by druid religionists, my understanding is that for the most part, the locals thought henges had been built by "giants." - They are probably resonsible for some but not all of the vestigial pagan symbolism present in the British Isles in the middles ages. The symbolism of mistletoe seems to have come from them. - Druid comes from a word that means "tree." Some sources translate the original form as "oak-knower" or "oak-wise" or something along those lines. The same root gives us "dryad." [/QUOTE]

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