Dollar Bills and Bibles

I seem to have been coming down pretty hard on religion lately. I hope my readers don’t confuse my position with being anti-spiritual. It’s just that I don’t find much of the spiritual in churches.

The spirituality I understand is that which seeks to find as much value in everyone’s approach to godliness as in one’s own. I find it runs far deeper in the currents of a clear Ozark stream than in the streams of invective that flow down from pulpits where preachers hold up their vision of virtue as the only viable vision. I find it more strongly expressed in the gentle sway of a great white oak in a spring breeze than in the violent winds of war. I find it more beautifully expressed in gentle movement of the moon across a black summer’s night than in the slow and inexorable resistance to change in the my-way-or-the-highway party line of the average church.

Recently I found a kinsman in the writings of David James Duncan. Duncan wrote one of my favorite books, “The River Why” back in the 70s. Not long ago a friend and I were discussing that book and he asked me if I had read “My Story as Told by Water”.
Duncan published that one in 2001 and I had missed it, so Mike loaned it to me.

I knew I had struck gold when I found this line in the first chapter: “Capitalist fundamentalism, I still believe, is the perfect Techno-Industrial religion, its goal being a planet upon which we’ve nothing left to worship, worry about, read, eat, or love but dollar bills and Bibles.”

What more could I add to that?


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle