32% said “Church of Scotland” (compared with 42% in 2001); 37% said “no religion” (compared with 27% in 2001); 16% said “Roman Catholic” (no change since 2001); 1.4% said “Islam” (compared with 0.8% in 2001); and around 0.1% said each of “Buddhism”, “Sikhism”, “Judaism”, and “Hinduism”. In practice, a visitor to Scotland could leave without really having noticed the religious life of the country, were it not for the sometimes surprisingly large number of relatively modern churches, especially from the 1800s, in even quite small communities, many now converted for other uses; and for the ruins of once grand medieval abbeys, cathedrals or churches which form the basis of many of Scotland’s visitor attractions. And to bring the picture completely up to date, the events of the last few years and their treatment in the media have given rise to a number of instances of religious intolerance of Muslims. Survival required knowing how to relate to food species like bison and fish, dangerous predators like bears, and powerful geological forces like volcanoes – and the rise of agriculture required expertise in the seasonal cycles upon which the sustenance of civilization depends.

The movement grew and in 1894 the members gave rise to the Donghak Peasant Revolution against the royal government. In his seminal essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” published in Science magazine in 1967, historian Lynn Townsend White, Jr. argues that those Biblical precepts made Christianity, “especially in its Western form,” the “most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” In stark contrast to pagan animism, Christianity posited “a dualism of man and nature” and “insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.” Whereas older pagan creeds gave a cyclical account of time, Christianity presumed a teleological direction to history, and with it the possibility of progress. To White, this was not a positive historical development. They said that Hindus have known for thousands of years that these materials provide health benefits but that scientists have confirmed only relatively recently that it’s because turmeric and copper have antimicrobial properties. Yet there are other benefits to encouraging and embracing family traditions in addition to simply making family time a bit more pleasant.

The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word “ecology” in the nineteenth century to describe the study of “all those complex mutual relationships” in nature that “Darwin has shown are the conditions of the struggle for existence.” Of course, mankind has been closely studying nature since the dawn of time. Traditional religion is having a tough time in parts of the world. In parts of northern Europe, this new faith is now the mainstream. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. As with most major religions, their are many different sects within Judaism. Little or nothing is known about religious practices before the arrival in Scotland of Christianity, though it is usually assumed that the Picts practiced some form of “Celtic polytheism”, a vague blend of druidism, paganism and other sects. Sectarianism, especially in relation to football, remains one of the least attractive aspects of modern Scotland. I follow Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre in seeing Romanticism as an element of modern culture, one that extends into the present day, whose representatives invoked premodern, precapitalist values and institutions against the hegemony of pecuniary and instrumental rationality.

This belief in progress was inherent in modern science, which, wedded to technology, made possible the Industrial Revolution. The rejection of traditional religion in these quarters has created a vacuum unlikely to go unfilled; human nature seems to demand a search for order and meaning, and nowadays there is no shortage of options on the menu of belief. Based on some theories of alchemists such as Wei Boyang in Eastern Han Dynasty, different kinds of medicine prescriptions were created by Sun Simiao and many other doctors. In the 1,800 years, Taoism influenced the local culture deeply, especially on traditional medicine and literature. One of the most significant influences in Sassanid culture was Zoroastrianism, which became the state religion. The estancias became one of the most important institutions in the economy, politics, and culture of Argentina. It was one of the few states in Europe not to systematically persecute Jews, and in the Declaration of Arbroath of 6 April 1320, the great and the good of Scotland put their name to a document containing a statement which translates as “there is neither bias nor difference between Jew or Greek, Scot or English”. It led to the supplanting of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland by the Presbyterian Kirk; and to the loss of much of the magnificent architecture built during the previous 500 years.