"The richness and diversity of our religions tradition throughout history is a spiritual resource long ignored by people of faith who are often afraid to open their minds to teachings first offered outside their systems of belief.  But the emergence of a civilization in which knowledge moves freely and almost instantaneously through the world has spurred a renewed investigation of the wisdom distilled by all faiths.  This panreligious perspective may prove especially important where our global civilization's responsibility for the earth is concerned." (pp. 258-259)

"The spiritual sense of our place in nature predates Native American cultures; increasingly it can be traced to the origins of human civilization. A growing number of anthropologists and archeomythologists, such as Marija Gimbutas and Riane Esler argue that the prevailing ideology of belief in prehistoric Europe and much of the world was based on the worship of a single earth goddess, who was assumed to be the fount of all life and radiated harmony among all living things. Much of the evidence for all existence of this primitive religion comes from the many thousands of artifacts uncovered in ceremonial sites. These sites are so widespread that they seem to confirm the notion that a goddess religion was ubiquitous through much of the world until the antecedents of today's religions, most of which still have a distinctly masculine orientation...swept out of India and the Near East, almost obliterating belief in the goddess.  This last vestige of goddess worship was eliminated by Christianity as late as the fifteenth century in Lithuania."