Genesis One – 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…

March 31, 2020
Byron Carrier

An array of on-line forum participation from last week. Photo from a Zoom meeting with my friend in the Philippines. She took a picture of her screen.

January 20, 2019
Byron Carrier

Sure, Thomas Jefferson was the sort of man who appreciated the French and their women, but in this case, the “broad” refers to a wide, flat ancient river. Lets review the river and the man towards our honoring both by living up to who we could yet be. I've left the cold of an Oregon winter for the cold of North Carolina's western mountains. I'm five miles out of Marshall, NC, former Madison County seat, now home to about 400 residents supporting three cafes, two…

May 3, 2018
Byron Carrier

And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31) We are born of and live in Eden, and it lives in us. We are made of it and for it. By Eden I don’t mean a mythical land of a biblical past, I mean the actual garden bible writers once loved, and I mean the rest of the garden that we should love. Eden suffers both blunder and attack by us humans, exponentially-so in the last two hundred…

December 16, 2017
Byron Carrier

How easy it is to take the goods of life for granted. I realized this in the usual way – by having something injured. Who notices how well their thumbs work? I don’t; they just do. But bang it a few times and infection sets in, making it throb with highly noticeable pain, and you’ll realize all the ways there are to bump it again and again doing ordinary things. Put a key in the lock? Ouch! Open a package? Oww! Type a sermon? …

January 24, 2012
Byron Carrier

It is interesting how a small population from a limited area during a narrow period of history shaped the essential religious and social concepts of our entire western civilization. In an area smaller than our western Oregon, the Jews, Romans, Greeks, and others mixed in a cauldron of clashes, generating ideas that would shape our basic view of history and set into us assumptions so familiar we don’t often notice them. We also don’t notice is the context in which these ideas were adopted while…

January 24, 2012
Byron Carrier

From Texas to Tehran, societies scurry to placate the power of those posing as pious – instead of affirming and advancing inherent intelligence and integrity. Modernity fears its own success. Instead of claiming and furthering the steady progress of science and the Enlightenment, it falls prey to those resentful of both. Fundamentalist advices to “have faith” or to “submit” turn us from knowledge, freedom, and responsibility, towards gullibility and obeisance. Decent souls, questing for what is good, flock to church and mosque only to be…

January 24, 2012
Byron Carrier

Have you noticed that the three great monotheistic religions of the world are also the three great problem makers in the world? Is God the problem? Does God want these vast forces to wage war with the others? We’re told lately that society has gotten too secular, too wayward, and that we should return to our religions and have more faith. But should we? Haven’t religions often been the source of problems – from stifling knowledge to torturing non-believers? Haven’t religions insisted on preposterous claims…

January 24, 2012
Byron Carrier

When I met Shri Bhagwan Rajneesh in a posh hotel in Bombay I wanted to punch him in the nose. I had gone to India sick of the west’s view of earth as merely a place for a divine drama that leads to an afterlife. In India I found its counterpart: a yearning for an instead-of life. Rajneesh sported a Rolex as he knocked the communists for wanting worldly improvements. He assured us the body isn’t real and neither is this world; they’re merely…

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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!

Learn more…

Progress and Regress

Otherwise, While I Should be Working

The French Broad, Thomas Jefferson, and a Holy Hope

Earth’s Eden: Love it or Lose it

Harvesting a Good Bounty

The Crucial Context of Christian Conceptions

Women, Wonder, and War

The Problem of Religion and the Promise of Creation

The Purpose of Life is to Give Life Purpose