You would think that religions would support preserving great spaces of wilderness. Wilderness (and not the cities) is where the sublime can be found, and the sublime promotes belief in God. Thomas Gray wrote this:
I own I have not, as yet, any where met with those grand and simple works of Art, that are to amaze one, and whose sight one is to be the better for: But those of Nature have astonished me beyond expression. In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation, that there was no restraining: Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 308.)
For a short biography of Thomas Gray, click here.
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