sexuality – Earthly Religion

For all Marys – Mothers, Lovers, Helpers

September 10, 2018
Byron Carrier

“My Goddess Gave Birth to Your God” reads the bumper sticker. The growing notion that God is not just and only male is well known in our UU churches and in other niches in society. Feminism has grown with us for decades and centuries. Gradually, it spreads around the world, bringing women status, freedoms, compensation, and rights in societies where patriarchy has ruled unquestioned for millennia. We need the Divine Mother, not just Our Father. But let’s also be careful to not just honor the…

January 7, 2016
Byron Carrier

I wouldn't have read Thanks for Noticing - The Interpretation of Desire by the Reverend Doctor Vern Barnet were he not my friend from seminary. Vern was a bold visionary, too much for the staid faculty at our University of Chicago seminary, Meadville/Lombard. His three-volume D. Min. thesis on The Void may have perplexed and overwhelmed them. True to his brilliant mind and audacious quirks, he brings his encyclopedic knowledge of trans-cultural mytho-religious facts into his penchant to link the sacred and the sexual. I'm…

Join the Newsletter!

Please enter your email address below and click submit to join the Earthly Religion newsletter. The newsletter is a periodic collection of recent writings, podcasts and news. We do not share email addresses with anyone.

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…