Ho Hum: "Yes everybody is religious including those that presume to be stridently anti-religious."

So you have added telepathy to your list of accomplishments -- anonymous telepathy too! -- and claim to know the minds of other contributors better than they do themselves. With those powers it's hard to see why you bother reading posts at all. Why not simply pluck our responses directly out of our cerebella?

Deep Green, that's a label I could get to like :)
Believe it or not a lot of non indigenous Australians have a deep spiritual connection to this land, what's more we're not self conscious about wanting to preserve it.
We don't cringe at the idea of having our own, for want of a better word,"dreaming".
My homeland is in central Victoria, I'm not from anywhere else, the ancestors who came here on ships are part of our mythology, beings who now exist out of time.

As a child I hunted and fished along the Loddon and Campaspe rivers.
My father, uncles and other kinsmen took us to camp for extended periods in the bush where they told us the names of all the plants and animals and their habits. At night we'd look up and pick out the constellations, we learned how to take a bearing from the stars, how to move through rough country at night, how to recognise the calls of the night birds and nocturnal animals.
We'd also visit places of great spiritual power, Mount Franklin, Mount Alexander or Turpin's Falls and travel further west to the Grampians, Lake Hindmarsh, the Little Desert.

Every person should feel the spiritual, supernatural connection to the first ground their feet touch, even if that ground is in Collingwood or Balmain or Fortitude Valley.
As I said in another thread, "mythbusting", the denial or suppression of a people's spirituality is only done for one reason, to harm them.

Jon J all of your posts say essentially the same thing over and over again. As such your ideological bias and world-view is completely obvious.

In essence human society is no different from a beehive or an ant colony. In a beehive, the queen simply pumps out eggs. And the other bees are "designed", in the grid-pattern of that particular species to have their particular functions. Each type of bee has its own genetic and chemical triggers, as a result of which it acquires a certain appearance and functions in a certain set manner. Every bee unconsciously fulfills its pre-patterned role, eventually becomes obsolete and dies. Apart from the queen none of the bees is any more important than any other bee.

Human society functions in exactly the same manner. There is a necessary biological replication process, by which replacement organisms are made - and also a process of replicating states of mind and emotion - and then you (the temporary link) become obsolete and drop dead. We are all just products of the human grid-patter.

What we cling to in our strutting self-importance is eventually shed without a moments hesitation - like excrement. From the perspective of the universe the body-mind "you" has has no ultimate importance.

Altogether the human process continues on automatically and unconsciously.
Nobody has any real clue as to what they or the process altogether is about. Everybody plays an unconscious pre-patterned role. Including all of the presumed "rugged individualists", the so called libertarians, the rebels and the seeming heroes too.

Some people pretend that there is some "genius" behind or driving Western "Civilization". But it is all just as much a part of the same unconscious beehive or ant colony grid-pattern replicating itself.

Ours is an unconscious "civilization", we are all quite literally sleep-walkers.

But it is possible to wake up, and thus "create" or participate in a Conscious Process and destiny.

I think that most discussion of this supposed tendency towards the supernatural among the Greens stems from the conflation of the generic "green" (i.e. environmental) and the political Green (i.e. a member or supporter of the Greens political party). Part of this confusion has historically been deliberate on the part of media detractors, and its effects are now seen in the mostly ignorant responses to the article.

In the 10 years or so that I've supported the Greens, I've become familiar with the Party's philosophy, structure and processes at every level from branch to National Council, and there is absolutely no spiritual or religious orientation in the Greens political party - but there is a strong commitment to tolerance of all religions. Like every other political party, they have a few nutters lurking on the fringes and voting for them, but they get nowhere near being able to influence anything much in the Greens. As a tolerant atheist, that suits me fine.

You do get the pagans, Wiccans, Gaia worshippers etc floating around the wider environmental activist scene, but as I don't have much involvement with specifically environmental groups I wouldn't know how influential they are. How many such people are there in Australia anyway? My guess is that most of them would actively eschew the political process.

What is obvious is that those who rave on most about the Greens political party being a religion in itself, or being comprised of Gaia-worshipping young ferals, are those who demonstrably know the least about Green philosophy, history, policy, structure and practices. In other words, they just make it up.

These guys really want environmentalism (or even the 'Greens') to be a religion. That way it is easier to rally their troops against them, using of course the Good Book's commandment No. 1.

It is of course increasingly difficult to rally the troops against what many might describe as a considered political opinion. Political opinions of course may be wrong (in fact they probably are to some degree in some way or other, by definition), but at least in a democracy people who hold them are accorded the respect of actually holding them, even if they disagree. But alternative religions? Nah, they're fair game for the true believers.

Shrill on, true believers.

So what do we call Bob Brown now?

The Grand Lizard?
The Mother Superior?
His Ozone Holiness?

It looks that at least he has Juliar kissing his ring piece.