Chris Hedges – Earthly Religion

Progress and Regress

November 30, 2023
Byron Carrier

Progress for me recently was buying a used 2012 Mitsubishi MiEV. Regress is the miserable direction our world is headed politically. I'll address both here. Regular readers here know I am a proponent of appropriate technologies such as electric vehicles. They are unquestionably better for our environment - simpler, peppier, and less expensive to operate. They are environmentally, economically, and ethically better for us. That's why I used my electric bike for three years around town instead of my big Taurus V-6. I like my…

October 31, 2022
Byron Carrier

Remember the 1955 movie “Rebel Without a Cause”? James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo played three distraught teens, alienated from their families, caught up in teenage toughness, resulting in a tragic accident. Those were the days when a switchblade knife at school was considered dangerously wrong. “Blackboard Jungle” that year also showed the disturbing trend, amplified much later in 1972 by “Clockwork Orange,” which portended purposeless violence. The Rebel Without a Cause movie was titled after the psychiatrist Robert Lindner’s 1944 book of the…

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The dream of an Earthly Religion…

Earthly: our precious natural earth which allows us our bodies, lives, cultures and future.

Religion: from the old root words religare and religio, meaning “to bind back to the root and be whole again.” This does not assume we need to believe in God or the Bible. Rather, we should be well-related with our own bodies, each other, natural life, and natural existence as it actually is. If there is connection with divinity or God, it is in and through our bodies and beings that we relate primarily, not via scriptures, traditions, rituals, or supposed religious authorities. In short, by religion we mean “relating well with reality.”

The emphasis here is on the earthly. It is not an afterlife or an instead-of-life that interests us. Living well here on earth together does.

While we take our religious perspective and work seriously, we don’t want it to be stuffy. Too often, religions can be alien to the human condition rather than affirming of it. They can be demeaning and demoralizing, dull and bossy, ponderously pretentious. We lean more towards the fun and sexy, natural and lively, human and humane, thoughtful and pertinent.

Reality: the obvious and inescapable stuff of physical existence. We intend to enjoy and tend our lives in these bodies, for our time, in our cultures, for our singular and interrelated ecosystem. There may be more, but there is AT LEAST THIS of which we are born, in which we live, and into which we will die.

God or no-God is not the point; Earth is. Both believers and non-believers are welcome here, for we all share a common source, opportunity, and responsibility: life as it is and could be. This ranges from simply improving one’s own life to your helping save and restore Eden’s, not just to “sustain” it, but veering it to thrive as never before. If you value your life, each other’s, and Earth’s – welcome!

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