Who am I to found a religion catering to atheists, ecologists, libertines, humanists, mystics, and believers?  Read on.

Here is my story, from birth on Hiroshima Day to now in my 80th year.  Raised Roman Catholic, I left it as a teen and later wandered into a liberal religion, Unitarian Universalist.  It is a small denomination of liberal-minded people far different than the Catholic way.  The nuns gave us a catechism, a book with the proper questions and answers.  In the UU way, members think for themselves, largely free of dogmatic pressures.  I earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology/philosophy and a master’s in divinity, and I became an ordained, fellowshipped minister.  As a UU minister, I served five congregations over 50 years as best I could.  But now I’m estranged from my denomination and religion in general.  My interest in religion is almost entirely in our environmental, social, political, and psychological senses.  Those who claim to know and impose God embarrass me. 

“There’ll be pie in the sky when you die” is a lie.  I’d rather we all have pie while we’re alive.  I’d update Marie-Antoinette’s “Let Them Eat Cake” to add, “And Let it be Good for Them Too.”  Good food for as many who can have it is a worthy religious aspiration.  One of the most innocent and sincere prayers I ever ran across came from an old Universalist hymnal: “Give me good digestion, Lord, and something to digest.”

I’m not one to feign piety or push fantastic beliefs.  Those who do – annoy me.  I’m largely humanistic (humans are free, fallible, and able), naturalistic (nature is dear; it is our origin and home), and deistic (the divine is found more through nature than scripture).

For me, religion isn’t a bad word or thing; it derives from ancient roots meaning, “to bind back to the root and become one again.”  The root from which we are estranged is our own Earth and our embodied lifetimes.  Religion is the activity of becoming whole with our place, our bodies, and our time.

For me, God isn’t the mysterious deity many of the theistic religions believe in and brandish.  Rather, God is the answer to what we know must be, yet it is beyond us.  We didn’t and don’t create the universe, except as we attempt to perceive, label, and use it.  Rather, it creates us, allowing our speculation, investigation, and potential mastery.  How it came into being, allowed life to arise, and set us on our wondering, wandering way, could be given “the God answer.”  Such an answer may only double the mystery; neither existence nor God is explained.  Humans seem to need to know, and many are sure they do.  I don’t, but I can call whatever is the ultimate answer to our abode and time “God.”  That some revere this, or detest it, or serve it, or forget it – doesn’t primarily concern me.  Any God worthy of belief wouldn’t demand it.

Instead, I want to rescue our earthly Eden and its humanity. Too much, our air, soil, rivers, oceans, and life systems have been allowed to deteriorate under the beliefs many religions promote.  Religions can ignore life, or waste it at whim while urging gullible but sincere believers to devote their lives to elaborate illusions instead. They may mean well, but the goodness of their intent is mired in old, dysfunctional scriptures, irrelevant practices, presumptuous authority, and preposterous preachings.

The point of God’s Goods isn’t God, it is God’s goods. As explained in other entries on this website, God’s goods are listed in Genesis One on page one of the Bible. They are the six evolutionary stages of natural existence, from light through matter to life to humans – all of it called “very good” by “God.”  We don’t have to “believe in the Bible” to agree that natural existence is good.

Though I don’t think we have to believe in God or the Bible, I take the lesson of its opening chapter as suitable for cherishing and rescuing the life it represents. That mythic cosmogonic foundational story (underlying the scriptures of all three theistic religions) clearly states that God generates our actual cosmos and all life in an evolutionary process. From light to land to life to us, we are created and deemed “good” by God. We live in, and are of, the goodness of natural existence. We should live up to ourselves in it. What is good? The cosmos is, and in and of the cosmos, Earth, and on and of the Earth, all Life, and evolved of that Life, us humans, males and females. Natural existence is good.

We love whatever Creator there may be by serving Creation.  Or we love and serve Creation itself, in and of itself.  The prophecy I promote avoids religious red herrings to relate us well to our precious earthly reality, physical and spiritual.  I think of religion as “relating well with reality.”

The reality I wish us to relate well with is at least this obvious, given, unavoidable, physical, living, conscious realm made up of the energy of atoms and reaching out to the far galaxies. But these micro and macro further reaches don’t interest me as much as the local ecological, social, psychological, and spiritual context in which we live our lives. There may be other dimensions and after-lives; I don’t care. I care about our ordinary lives lived in our sense of time and place.  Until we take care of our home base – planet Earth, our societies, our bodies ─ we’ve no business pining for more than this grand gift we are given. Living well on Earth is my religion.

We could live a long time on planet Earth. It spins reliably and we’ve recently come to understand much of how it works. We know enough to turn our earthly Eden into a poisoned, exhausted wasteland ─ or into a fully flourishing, reliably abundant wonderland. 

Don’t believe; behave. Don’t cower; create. Don’t deny; celebrate.

Prophecy doesn’t profit the prophet.  People don’t like hearing sensible “if-then” relationships, so they try to ridicule and ignore the prophet.   But in the larger economy and ecology of human involvement, prophecy is needed.  My approach, grateful for the larger cosmos that generates life and allows us to evolve, is critical of most religions, and seeks better relationships among humans, with life, reality, and “God.”

This is my real work.  So far, it is a meager living, barely above poverty, but I “get by” on an abundant level, better than most humans, less than those around me.  I’m like an artist or musician, creating because I want to and think it fits our time in the human story.

For me, this calling to prophesy came not a single blinding flash, but an accumulation of realizations and inclinations gathered over a lifetime.  At age 79, it is time to deliver these over in service of God’s goods.  Here’s what led to my founding God’s Goods and why I continue to publish monthly to its website, earthlyreligion.com.

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My Story

The Background of War

I was born the day my country bombed and burnt to death hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent civilians in Hiroshima, Japan.  Reasons and rationalizations notwithstanding, the plain fact is we showed our will to kill civilians.  Talk about terrorism!

Hiroshima, August 6th in Japan, August 5th in Pontiac, Michigan, 1945, just before and after my birth, .  

Any desperate or deluded person or group can do that.  Humanity can’t go back to simpler weapons.  Whenever there is a better shield, a better sword will be built, and then a better shield.  What can protect against huge bombs or tiny viruses?  Military answers must and will be given, but what of spiritual and social causes and their corollary answers?

This seems a background theme of my life – the ridiculous yet typical propensity to create, and then rationalize, the needless violence and waste of war. (It isn’t just atomic bombs; we deliberately fire-bombed Japanese cities on windy nights, and have inflicted similar anguish on citizens in places we warred with, such as Dresden, Frankfurt, and Vietnam. In Iraq (which never attacked us) today [originally written in 2004] my government has killed more innocents than we lost when mostly Saudis (or so it is asserted) attacked our Trade Towers and Pentagon. War for oil is a mad rush of wasting energy to seize energy to go on wasting energy in our fat cars and sloppy technologies. We “attack with defense.” We accuse them of having the weapons we then use. They hate back in vengeful reprisal. We thus mutually assure ongoing cycles of revenge.)

As a boy of seven or eight, I remember the happiness of the ending of the Korean War.  My dad was a product-testing engineer at the Cadillac Tank Plant in Cleveland, Ohio.  My mom joked about being stuck in the top hatch of one because she was pregnant.

Dad painted the testing of the new hydrogen bomb at Bikini over our mantle, the huge explosion flipping mere battleships.  Mom’s sweet potato plant framed it with green leaves.  Mom was probably embarrassed.

I drew early pictures of tanks and guns.  I thought the nazi swastika was cool looking until I realized they were the bad guys, who I should hate.  Later, in high school in Michigan, I was halfway through All Quiet on the Western Front before I realized a German wrote it.  My sense of “us and them” had to get switched, even though my sense of humanity for them and us was touched.  We are “them” to others, though we are all inextricably “us.”

Ecology

Two other budding trends had started then on Oakland Lake in southeastern Michigan.

Brother Tom and I at Oakland Lake

One was the gradual awareness of the loss of life in the lake.  When we moved there, muskrats built mounds in the lake and tunnels on the shore.  I helped trap them, catching their legs below the ice so they’d drown. I’d skin them and get a dollar at the hardware store.  Huge dogfish swam below their brood, an unusual parenting for a fish.  I’d spear them through the babies, but then not eat them, for they were in a class with catfish, said to be not edible.  We even had an ancient garpike in the middle of the deep lake, with huge alligator snouts. All of these animals disappeared from the lake, eliminated by boys like me and all the lawn fertilizer and oils polluting the ecology of the lake.  Regret for what was lost began to enter me.

Another concern arose in me back then on Oakland Lake in southeastern Michigan. Ecological challenges are in many ways larger than those of war. War is costly and destructive, but limited to certain areas. The poisoning and extinction of life are ubiquitous; it is built into our ordinary technological and social processes.

Regret for what was lost began to enter me. I can remember what was; new generations won’t know what’s missing and never will – unless we start to care.

My dad didn’t hunt, but I wanted to “be a man,” so I asked the man across the street if I could go hunting with him.  He said he would take me, but first I had to practice by killing the blue jays that woke him in the mornings.  I’d sit under his trees, BB gun in hand, waiting.  When I did shoot a jay it lay there on the ground, glaring at me, as if to say, “Why?”  I had to shoot it again and again.  Still, it didn’t die, so I threw it against the tree till it did.

I also used to flush pheasants with my Irish setter as an excuse to walk in the fields, and then we’d hunt them during the season.  I used a single-shot 20-gauge shotgun.  It was more sporting than a 12-gauge repeater.

Brad and Red at our Home on Oakland Lake

But the same thing happened.  I’d down a bird only to have it stare at me till I reached in and broke its neck.  The few bites of meat didn’t justify the unease I felt at killing the beautiful bird.

I began to realize being a man meant being callous enough to kill even if my heart was against it.  Realizing that, I then renounced hunting.  I’d rather let the animals have their lives.  Killing them violated them and me.  I renounced what was not me and so became more myself.  This would not fit with other boys and men, but to be an honest man I had to admit my repugnance at killing even simple creatures.

The other realization came in composting.  The old German couple that lived next to us would put their table scraps in an ongoing trench in their garden, changing what would be garbage into soil.  I experimented with it, putting coffee grounds in a place near the shore, soon finding many more worms there.

I also began experimenting with how many sheets of toilet paper it really took to get the job done.  It seemed wasteful of my parent’s money and the paper itself to use more than needed.  I went from eight to six to four.  I used less than half of what I once did.  Could such a small, simple, and private thing influence the world?  Only years later, reading Buckminster Fuller and Fritz Schumacher, did I realize it could and does.  What even one does matters, especially when millions of other ones are doing it too.

From Catholic to Nothing to UU to God’s Goods

I was the oldest of five children.  Dad was twenty years older than Mom.  She, being Catholic, didn’t allow any birth control.  Five was a lot.  Dad, who once told me everything a man does is to have a bed to sleep in and a woman to share it with, slept in the basement, alone.  Ironic, eh?

Alice [Thompson] Beckwith Carrier (Mom, at my birth)

Byrl Atha Carrier (aka Byron and Buck), my dad, and my mom, Alice

Though raised Catholic I began to question it.  At age fifteen I went to the nice priest in his office (not the screened confessional) to confess I didn’t believe in the Catholic teachings on birth control and other religious teachings, so continuing to come was the sin of hypocrisy.  I had liked the aesthetics and short sermon of the Mass and valued some aspects of the religion, but couldn’t go on pretending I believed when I didn’t.  I left.  As the eldest of five, this caused upheaval in my family.

In my senior year in high school, I stumbled into a Methodist weekend seminar called The Ecumenical Institute.  They wore us down with a recounting of the twentieth century, asking at the end, “Who are you and how do you fit into this?”   Am I just a student, just a consumer, or do I have some responsibility to the world?

I had taken a job at the local funeral home, doing their yard and parking cars at funerals.  Then I helped move caskets and get bodies from the hospital.  Then I helped in the ambulance.  (Funeral homes supplied ambulance services then, using their large hearse for a makeshift ambulance.)

I saw people die, saved a few from it, and caught a slippery baby when the mother delivered it.  I helped embalm bodies, even some of the people I knew, back from Vietnam.

The decent owners of the funeral home urged me to get a license, so I did.  Though I had studied art mostly in high school and had no plans for college, I had to do two years before going to mortuary school.  While I had avoided all science earlier I fell in love with it in junior college, especially chemistry and anatomy.  The reliable marvels of the actual structure of matter and life amazed and intrigued me.  I liked college-level learning so much that I returned after mortuary school to work on a bachelor’s degree.

By then I had started attending a Unitarian church, attracted by a sermon about sex by Bob Marshall on Mother’s Day.  Thoughtful sermons were the center of the Sunday service.  Unitarians welcome and practice philosophical and social inquiry, honoring reasonable investigation and skepticism of religious claims.  By the time I graduated (with honors in psychology and philosophy), I decided to leave funeral directing and become a Unitarian minister.  Funeral directing can be a decent profession, like where I worked, but it was rarified, dwelling always on bodies and grief.  I wanted to take on the larger life that includes death while transcending it.

The seminary was very dynamic during those revolutionary years.  The school (Meadville Lombard Theological School), supposedly liberal, was really fairly stuffy, though it was located at the famous University of Chicago. Mircea Eliade, founder of the History of Religions, had his office in our seminary.  (The Unitarians once held all four corners of 57th and Woodlawn.  Now they’re down to one.)

Two ideas especially enthused me then, Jungian psychology and Eastern religions.  When I got to the University of Chicago in 1969 I met a man from India who was fresh there from having studied with Carl Jung.  Dr. Vasavada became my close friend and teacher.

Until I taught him to drive, I would drive him around.  (I taught him to drive a car; he taught me to drive in life.)  We’d talk of meditation and his gurus.  I’d sit with him at his Friday evening group meditations.  After, we’d share tea or scotch. He helped ordain me.

Dr. Vasavada at my Ordination, between Reverend Drs. Bart Gould and Vern Barnet

My Pilgrimage in India

In the hot summer of 1872, I flew to India, briefly landing in Paris, taking a fast communion in Notre Dame. Immediately upon arriving, Vasavad hurried us off to nearby Gudjrat State where his guru was visiting.  The Blind Saint of Brindivan, Swami Sharnanand sat in a simple room with another blind guru.  “The Blind Leading the Blind,” I joked in my mind.   

The following exchange happened on Day Two of my time in India. 

I had two questions for the saint.  The first embarrassed the translators, but not him: “What is it like to be a saint; how does it differ from what I have?” 

“A saint is a member of the universal human family,” he laughed.  His vacant blind eyes would roll down as if looking at me.

The second question took more to answer.  “I am appalled at the violence of my country in Vietnam,” I complained, “what can I do to change it?” 

“What is the cause of war?” he asked, and answered, “It is men taking fascination with their minds and the products of their minds,” an unexpected reply.  He went on to say any effort at changing these results only in limited and sometimes opposite effects, because of being in the realm of cause and effect. 

He held my hands, feeling them.  “What do you do?” he asked.   I tried to explain my learning and Unitarian ministry.  He said to give up my books and devote myself to hard physical labor for the general betterment of mankind, not asking for pay, but taking whatever is offered.  “Then,” he went on, “when you are tired you will find peace, and you will emanate an invisible perfume of unlimited effect.”  That perfume would create deep, unreactive peace.

His answer, perhaps a stock one, has lived in the back of my mind ever since.  It comes true, I find lately when I work hard at building dry-stack retaining walls out of boulders, rocks, and crushed rock.  I make them as aesthetically beautiful as they are structurally sound.  It is a meditation in the Now, taking lots of physical work.  I sweat and toil.  I get boogers worth picking.  Each rock has its own challenge and reward.  Each rock shares the load with the others.  At the end of the day, my work has visible, functional results lasting for hundreds of years.  When I shower, it’s worth it, the dirt flowing down the drain, is gone.  My meditations or sleep are indeed deep.  Maybe the perfume of unlimited effect emanates.  

Before

After

Me and my son Tobias at a job

Me at the bottom of a tall repair job

The other was meeting Sri Rajneesh, later called Osho. I had gotten sick. I avoided nothing in India, thinking my resilient body would ward off any pathogens, not realizing even the Indians get dysentery. I went from a slim 145 pounds to a wasted 125. I discovered just how full of shit I was! I also had been robbed (at the ashram!), so I was grateful to be housed in Bombay (now called Mumbai) at a relative of Dr. Vasavada’s near the Parsi Towers of Silence

where they leave their dead to be eaten by vultures.

I saw a poster for a notorious guru, Rajneesh. India may have once had a sexual culture, as depicted in the erotic statues on some of their temples, but is today a puritanical culture with clear separation of the sexes. Rajneesh, of the Tantric tradition, was said to encourage sexual wildness as a way of getting past that fascination.

When Rajneesh entered the posh hotel room all his devotees glowed with adulation. He wore clean whites and sported a Rolex on his wrist and a big ring on his finger. He had beautiful eyes, very calm and present.

He went on about the very thing I found difficult in Indian religion – that we are not the body and this world is just Maya, an illusion. I thought of how this plays into the Indians allowing their rivers to turn to cess. I thought of the square block of cardboard “houses,” only a few miles from where we sat, where a thousand people shared one water spicket and no toilet. I thought of how sick I was. Here he sat in privileged ease, a big Rolex on his wrist, knocking the communists for caring about earthly conditions, claiming realization is worth the abandonment of our mere earthly maya. I thought all this and wanted to go up and smash him hard in the nose in order to ask him a philosophical question: “If the body is not real and the world is just Maya, would you mind if I hit you again?”

I didn’t, for I didn’t dislike him or want to actually hurt him (and then get me jumped by his devotees). But I saw in his smug stance a dismissive, uncaring attitude towards the very real suffering in India.

I saw the Eastern belief in Maya (favoring some other realm than this embodied, earthly one) as the counterpart of the Western belief in an afterlife (favoring the soul’s lasting abode in heaven or hell over the mere temporary drama of our lifetimes). Neither takes the precious possibility of a lovely, sustainable life here on earth seriously or responsibly. Both substitute far-fetched speculations and egoistic posturing for an ethical and rewarding life here on earth. Both sin against what I call “God’s goods” this way. The good people of both cultures, who look for identity and reasons to do what’s right, are religiously misled to unworldly, even anti-worldly, perhaps illusory imaginations.

Back to America

I returned from India to an even greater culture shock – the shallow life of frantic and wasteful consumerism. Having seen the value of clean water when thirsty, or a banana when hungry, to see the rampant waste of our glut serving no higher purpose – dismayed me. I saw the most important thing we could export to 3^rd world cultures like in India was not industrialization but examples of those living a happy life without wasting so much other life – our needs, not our greeds – as Gandhi said.

Like thousands of Gautamas coming to India from the West, relatively affluent American and European hippies went past their moneyed foundation to enter a life of spiritual seeking. Their example reminded Indians of their religious foundation gradually being lost to industrialization and consumerism. This world needs examples of those who find greater life satisfaction from simpler means. We don’t have to exploit to enjoy.

Here’s my passport photo from when I left for India, and another was taken after the first was stolen. I had lost 20 pounds by the second.

Skinny, and broken down in spirit, I went west to southern Oregon and lived in a quasi-commune with some hippies in the woods. Oregon was so much more awesome in turns of ample nature than I had known in Michigan. The trees formed an overstory under which one can roam easily. Elevation is all in turns of weather. The salmon still come up the streams. The culture is young, not settled into family dynasties and set cultural assumptions.

With the hippies and other “counter-culture” types, I came to experience and value all those things we’re now told we’re to be beyond = sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. I affirm them. Prissy, picky, pretentious preachers never appealed to me. I am a whole human. I don’t want to sell my soul by pretending to be pious. I’m with Emerson on this – authenticity trumps posturing.

Here’s Silver Man, one of our honored elders, spreading his silverness to our youth at the Oregon Country Fair.

As a Unitarian Universalist minister for forty years now I have praised sex from the pulpit, though not as fervently as I could and it deserves. I am libertine towards it. While it can be a realm of obsession, addiction, and ample troubles, it can also be a realm of great pleasure, soul communion, community interdependence, and life satisfaction. The drive to think about sex ought not be denied or shamed, but welcomed, investigated, and shared. It is matched only by the other human propensity towards it: shame. Most Western religions automatically pick shame.  I’m against shame, religiously.  I see it as the first sign of sin – as shown in the second Genesis creation story

As earlier in seminary, so then with the hippies, and even now, I found certain types of drugs to be worth the risk. Pot, LSD, mushrooms, mescaline, peyote, Ecstasy, and especially 5 MeO DMT open the inner paths to realization and awed, loving connection. Being anti-addictive (though pot can be an over-used habit) they stand in the opposite corner from the problematic addictive drugs: speed (meth), cocaine (crack), heroin, and many drugs legally promoted by the pharmaceuticals. I never cared for the latter group. I never gave in to the social demand to condemn, deny, and prosecute the former. Such drugs are part of our human curiosity and rights. All cultures have some sort of them. The issue for me (other than speaking against ignorant and counterproductive repression of them) is: which to favor or not. Some are nothing short of entheogens (to put/find God within); they are sacraments with results. Being able to use them is our religious right.

Finally, rock ‘n roll sums up any human enjoyment of music. Humans make and enjoy music in a way the other animals don’t seem to. While the birds, frogs, etc., make their music, ours is far more varied and prone to make us dance. When a tune resides in my mind overnight, it intrigues and delights me. I speculate music is part of what allowed us to evolve as humans.

Besides this trio, I also came to value and promote an earlier theme from my life: ecology. How can our culture claim to be advanced if there are fewer salmon in the streams than when we arrived? What technological blunders enamor us to our peril? How are we being responsible if the aquifers are drained or polluted? Should we hurry to waste all our oil despite global warming? Do we value the trees, which shade the ground and transpire water, cool the air, and thus attract more rain? The shared systems of our massive yet fragile earth could live in splendid abundance for millions of years, were we to treat them right. My early care for fish, birds, compost, and using less toilet paper was part of a collective consciousness (you’re part of this, too) that cannot be a mere fad – if we are to survive.

From Unitarian Universalist Ministries to God’s Goods

Healed from India in Oregon, I returned to the Midwest and took a job as a campus minister in Urbana, Illinois. There I found, while reading a Catholic bible, the most amazing scripture passage: Genesis One. Genesis One forms the scriptural foundation for God’s Goods. Though I don’t claim the bible is the “word of God,” I favor this passage for what it says God says: this universe, our earth, all life, and we humans too – are all good. This is the six stages of creation story, remarkably close to the scientific stages of physical and biological evolution theory. Significantly, each and every stage is not only created by God, but is valued by God as “good.” Humans (males and females) are part of this, which God values as good. To me, this passage justifies naturalism, humanism, and deism. To the rest of the religious world, so bent on instilling shame and alienation, it stands as a beacon and challenge.

I began preaching on this back then, forty years ago. The God of this passage is very different than the God of the Garden of Eden passage, the second creation story. That God is singular and masculine, YHWH. This God of Genesis One is singular and plural, masculine and feminine, Elohim. While Genesis Two/Three describes a change in consciousness, losing the goodness just described, chapter One reminds us of the given goodness of natural existence and suggests a way for us to be in it – especially “replenish” it.  

Another thinker was working on the same basis: Matthew Fox, who wrote Original Blessing. I found in his book agreement with my emerging realization of what our world needs religiously.

I married Janice Lynn in Urbana and we had our first son, Tobias Iam. We left to investigate Costa Rica, but returned to Florida, then North Carolina, where I took a job as a country preacher for the old Red Hill Universalist Church, where I served for five years and our second son, Ira Abraham, was born.

Here, on the Carolina coast, my dad shows my son, Tobias, the farther view.

Ordained in the UU ministry but not having finished seminary or received the denomination’s fellowshipping (I had been ordained in 1973 by a UU church in St. Joseph, Michigan) we returned to Chicago where I received my Masters of Divinity and fellowshipping, two days after our third son, Benjamin Byron, was born (also at home, as had Ira).  I briefly placed him on the altar of Hull Chapel where I was conducting a worship service.  

It was during this interval that I also started a three-year stint of graduate-level training in humanism at the Humanist Institute in New York City. (If ever I raise money for organizations beyond my own, this would be one of them.) This valuable storehouse of rational thought impressed me, even if it was also not very aesthetic or emotional. It is the sort of thought ridiculed by conservative Christians. It is humanity’s treasure, a valid part of any sensible and responsible religion. Unfortunately, it is largely at war with God and religion (for all the silly, sad, and diverting aspects of those). Rationalism, criticism, and skepticism are needed, but so is heartfelt religious coherence. Can humanism exist with God? To me, humanism, environmentalism, and mysticism are the fulfillment of the goods God generated.

It was about this time when I also had the opportunity to meet Mr. Nobody, Sri Shunyat, at Vasavada’s. Shunyata is in the line of awakened mystics through Ramana Maharshi.

We liked each other and we conversed by mail for some years after that. Rational and scientific though I am and favor, I also am drawn to the inexplicable lure of the gurus, not for show or position, but because of something inner. I see this as fulfilling humanism in a way most humanists would not.

After a hard year in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was assigned to be the first minister for the thirty-year-old fellowship in Ashland, Oregon, just miles from where I had earlier lived. We loaded up the cars and moved west.

I was to help them grow. Grow we did, tripling the congregation in a few years and buying their first church building, an exemplary accomplishment in our denomination.

I had a knack for preaching and being with people. I adopted a decidedly liberal religious public stance in an era when that word was being ridiculed and sidelined. I also helped start a fellowship in neighboring Grants Pass and often visited others in Oregon and California. Here I am giving the Invocation at the opening of the Oregon Legislature.

Success was stress. Upon occupying our new lovely building I found my creative urgings ignored. I felt isolated amid the public eye, lonely for company and touch. When I started to get close to a young woman marginally related to the congregation (but stopped) it still became a huge issue. Though I answered it all honestly then, there was too much accusation and divisiveness, so I resigned at the end of my eighth year. Though over half of the congregation supported me, the wear and stress proved too much. I found no support much less understanding from my colleagues and denomination during and after that.

Having moved to ten houses by the time I entered the fifth grade as a boy, I didn’t want to jack my boys around the country in equally ephemeral ministerial settlements. I made a go of it in Ashland doing wage work, mostly picking or stacking rocks into retaining walls and steps.

I liked this hard physical work, which reminded me of Swami’s suggestion regarding labor. After a couple of years, I became an independent contractor, and then later an employer, all in this unexpected realm. I also continued to serve small Unitarian fellowships on weekend visits and write infrequent editorials.

This dark period of my life had serious deleterious effects on my marriage and family. Though I regret the overly riled up and harsh treatment of me by my denomination and some people in the Ashland fellowship, I most regret the mistake that played into their rout of me and my resignation. I necked with a young woman twice, and in light of that, coupled with ample punitive pressure from the UUA, a few moments of inappropriate kissing meant more than eight years of rapid success.

I’ve since gone on to recoil from the public stress to pay the mortgage and rebuild my spirit. I worked labor jobs – carpentry, rock walls (see rockwalls.biz), and maintenance work. I’ve done what I could to prepare and present programs, mostly for the UU Fellowship of Grants Pass.  But injured by earlier UU slights, I’ve been unable to promote the cause I had once championed of this mostly admirable liberal religion.

I have managed to have fun. I retired while I worked and I work in retirement. I’m a bit like Enkidu, the Wild Man.

and my sons are leaping into life too.

My former wife is happily remarried and my sons have all grown up well. I am proud of them all.

 My “Real Work” is Prophetic and Pastoral, but can it Profit?

But in the back of my mind during ministry and after was always this urge to explore and share my earlier inspiration related to Genesis One. The question from the Ecumenical Institute was still apt: where do I place myself in history? We are the incarnate generation. Who will rescue the world from its misdirection? If not me, then who? I’m no wizard. Though I have a Master in Divinity, I know I don’t know It All. But the view of the outside and the inclination inside both say to me, “Try.” If not now, then when?

How could the world’s great problem religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) forget and forsake the clear message of Genesis One? It’s as if they play the role of the subtle deceiver snake, tricking us into a false or confused sense of good and evil, alienating us from the original and ongoing goods that underlie and beckon us. We lose what is good in us when we follow their subtle, alienating confusion about “good and evil.”

How is it the world’s three great monotheistic religions dwell on the problems of Genesis Two and Three, shaming people for their sexuality, tricking them out of their ability to think, excusing ecological and economic ruin, dissing evolution, waging wasteful wars, while overlooking and ignoring this single scripture passage underlying all their scriptures affirming the natural and human order as good?

For decades this message has been calling me to share it. Hence, I yield to this ongoing intuition to work in this realm, sharing and challenging both secular people and religious types to admit the words of Genesis One and to apply them to this, our given, obvious, and precious realm.

The words of Genesis One don’t create the value of Nature. That value, the goodness of the world (and us in it), precedes and transcends any scripture. It just happens this scripture, so foundational in the world of theistic religion, also affirms the natural order and our human freedoms and responsibilities in it. It fits believers and non-believers.

I wish to devote my time, talent, and learning to this message. I don’t know where it will lead. It will unfold. There is an inexplicable blessing assisting. I am no saint. I found this religion on my (and everyone’s) fallibility and ability. I hope to spend time doing commentary, ceremonies, and counseling. I can stack rocks, and like to give my labor to that which betters a place, but my work should be more deliberate and productive now. I want to make a decent profit doing prophecy, helping save the world as I go through it and out of it.

If you’ve read this far I hope you’ll read my other sermons and editorials and help support my work, my dharma. Vasavada said dharma is our inner nature wanting to do its work. This is my “real work”: to religiously love this physical earth and our amazing bodies, to redirect our religious devotion from pining for afterlife salvation by believing in preposterous set-ups while ignoring and wasting natural creation. We should honor whatever Creator, as may be or not, by living fully, well, and responsibly in Creation.

Coda: New Relationship and a Trip to Italy

I have been a lucky man. I have a strong, youthful body, a bright, creative mind, and three good sons, and I’ve had wonderful relationships with women. I have a lingering affection for all my women, especially my former wife. However, on July 4^th, 2014 I met Maya Lyn, my sweetie, and I have entered a committed and promising relationship with her.

I got to spend a month with her recently where I created a planter out of all the crystal quartz on her property.

We plan to go to northwest Italy in September of 2015 for her son Zen’s wedding and birthday, and we want to walk the Cinque Terre trail along the coast. It’ll be good for me to “get out of town” and encounter the Renaissance foundation of our modern civilization in Florence.

I’ve lived on the edge of poverty all my life. I’m open to changing that, in part by welcoming contributions for this fun trip and for my “real work.” If you’d like to contribute to my real work, please use the PayPal Donate button here at Earthlyrelgion. I’d like to start being paid for my worth and work. I’d like to profit enough to do effective prophesy. You can help get this new phase of my life going with any gift you feel inclined from within to send my way.

(Update as of January, 2017)

(Many hours of writing an update in October of 2024 were lost in BlueHost’s bizarre system.  I’m sick of trying to write a bio that is scattered into frustration and uncertainty.)

What isn’t uncertain is my interest in getting to my “real work,” my prophetic voice to add to the cultural conversation of today.  The root assumptions rampant in our conservative culture today (January, 2017) as Republicans sweep all levels of our government and Trump installs enemies of it and ignores and befouls our environment, need to be exposed and redirected.

The great mammals of our earth are being hunted to extinction.  The seas are rising, and the coral bleaches and dies.  Droughts, dustbowls, and forest fires are growing.  Rain events are flooding us like never before.  A mean and judgmental approach to justice and punishment has our privatized prisons stuffed more than any other industrialized country.  Stress has us scared, snapping at each other.  Our religions mostly ignore all this.  Some even promote it, blithely dismissing Earth as a mere stepping-stone to a presumed Heaven. 

If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll go to the Participate tab and the Contribute page to consider supporting me in adding this life-affirming, life-promoting, sort of perspective to the collective conversation.  Religion should relate us well to reality – outer and inner.  Wholeness is our holiness.

Update in October of 2024

It is time for me to admit my hopeful efforts have come to naught.  Though I dutifully contribute something monthly to this site, only a few read it.  The interest and support I thought I had in UU congregations never arrived.  I haven’t developed a meditation group, occasional services, a counseling practice, or any sort of income.  It’s all a lonely effort with hardly any recognition or support.   Despite tripling one congregation and founding another, I’ve been sidelined and forgotten, somewhere between “barely was” and “might have been.” 

I look back at career turning points and wonder. 

I never pursued advertising, putting my artistic talent to the service of products I don’t admire.  Rather than use classical conditioning to pair a waterfall with Salem Cigarettes, I’d rather promote the “Take a breath” yearning in us to just breathe, or visit the waterfall directly.  

I could have stayed with the good family running an expanding funeral home business.  I could have continued with my interest in psychology to become a psychologist. 

I could have played a safer game in the liberal ministry than risk considering touchy topics with rationality and universalistic inclusivity.  The “free pulpit” is a precarious place in the UU system.  Contrary to its core values, it now hounds and expells ministers who don’t say the right things in the right way about the right causes.  Woke dogmatism has shattered an already small denomination into an alienated schism.  (See the new splinter group: NAUA.)  I don’t make any money from the denomination and congregations I once full-heartedly served; they rake it in from the momentum I helped create.  I might have used my passionate years to promote my ideas, causes, and income rather than a denomination’s increasingly narrow and treacherous agenda.  

The fellowship I helped found and served for a quarter of a century dealt me a one, two, three exit message.  (Admittedly, the last Zoom sermons there during the Covid times were the worst of my career.  I blundered in that medium.)  It’s part of a national trend, making holy words like “covenant,” “beloved,” and “love” into the tools of a power play. 

Lots of good ministers and some congregations have pulled away from the UUA, but not a word about it appears in their national magazine.  They’ll plunder the remaining assets of collapsing congregations to fund their dogmatic wokism, while ministers and adherents like me will scurry for scraps.  The social relevance and leadership so sorely lacking in today’s religious/political plight is pathetically absent.  The Transcendentalist, Deist, and Enlightenment aspects of realistic and relevant religion dwindled in history.  Instead, gullible belief and mindless obedience to preposterous theology lead the masses to fervently promote and obey a wealthy, gaudy, idiot antichrist.  The UUs I knew and many decent Americans are not that, but it’s more because of their character than their religion. 

In my 80th year, I’m weary and worried.  Fanatical fundamentalism foments tribal hatred from Tehran to Texas.  Utterly amoral ultrawealthy zealots fund the worldwide takeover of media and governments.  The transnational predicament of global overheating and similar injuries from our modern chemistries and entrenched lucrative industries should call us to mutual awakening, but to the extent it has, we’re more the victims of it than the masters of it.

Nor does my griping from my irrelevant corner of life fix it.  Nor have I otherwise just enjoyed my summer.  I yearned to take people on the pleasant walk to the secret waterfall.  I wanted some friends to climb Pilot Rock.  I sought jam partners for my funky guitar riffs.  I would have liked a nice bronze suntan.  (I’m one of those “whites” that does well with a tan.)  Instead, my feet show a bit of the tan missing from most of my body.

___________________

Besides all my whining and ranting, I’m grateful to be healthy and intelligent at almost 80. The best news is that my youngest son, Ben, and his darling spouse Kayla are having a son, my grandson, Able Byron Carrier.