“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.” -G.K Chesterton
God is severe in His desire for worship, jealous and refuses to share His glory with anything in this world: not out of vainglory, but for our sake. For God desires to preserve the world from the idol-making human heart so it can be given back to us. When God says worship me and not the pleasures of this world, it is so our heart can be primed to enjoy the pleasures of this world.
In this sense, the true worshiper is the only naturalist. If you don’t worship God then you worship nature and nature is no longer natural.
The alternative to monotheism is pantheism. Even atheism is a form of pantheism, making material goods our gods. And pantheism gives agency to Mother Nature. Everything in nature is a god. The sun is a god, and so is the earth and everything in between. Without God, sex is hyped up into spiritual experience, and so in the temples of Aphrodite, prostitutes were also priests. But to the worshiper of God, the sun is simply the sun, the earth is the earth, and sex is the pleasure shared by two intimates with the amazing possibility of creation. All things of this world is consecrated simply by letting them be.Nature is simply what it is, part of the natural order, our “younger sister” as Chesterton puts it — and all her pleasures are always pointing to her Creator.
The worship of God and not creation, is not, as some thoughtlessly argue, the denial of the world but the fullest affirmation of the world.
We worship God for it opens us up to a world of pleasures.