The Riches of the Faithful Souls

Colors surround me. Brilliant colors of life.



The sweet, heavy scents of jasmine, lilac and roses enter my house.



My effort to become a proper vegetarian cook for my youngest child, now she has embraced vegetarianism, continues, with mixed results. I realize I don't really know what I am doing, absent the gratifying contributions of meat.

All of a sudden, every meal I try to prepare for her seems unbalanced. I use too many vegetables -- that is clear. I wish I had more knowledge about this sort of thing.

Summer came back. This weather is downright weird. It's cold; it's hot. No rhyme or reason. It is disorienting.

All of sudden, also, I am busy. People keep discovering the things I write about on my Bnet blog. Maybe I've become a witness to history.

The death of the old and the birth of the new? Now I am in demand. Going here and there. Getting quoted. Giving speeches, appearing on panels. People buy me meals.

It's all good. It's all fine. It's happened many times before. When you suddenly once again discover that you are at the center of some particular universe, it can be a heady moment, at least when you are young.

Now it just is what it is. I'm grateful, very much so. I feel like I'm back on the road to economic recovery, on a personal basis, so I hope the country soon is too. But there is no particular sense of pride or self-oriented feeling available.

It's more like the stream of life, you know. We are always moving, in this world, even when we feel like we're standing still. We never are still. Thanks to gravity, we are clinging to a ball of rock spinning madly through a giant universe, only alive at all because we can grow crops in the six inches or so of soil that is the entire legacy of all of our ancestors and all other organic life on earth.

That's it. And that's why the "primitive" religions of aborigines are far more appealing, on a sensible, scientific level, than these fancy, over-bloated majors that rely on invented narratives rather than on the basic facts of life.

Worshiping our ancestors is the right thing to do. From them, and what they have given our soils, the nutrients yielding all edibles sprout. There is no "us" without "them."

It's as simple as that. The Japanese thank all food with a lovely, simple prayer before they consume it. As far as I can tell, they say, "Thank you for giving your life so that I may live."

We all should learn that prayer. Forget the bullshit they teach at temple, church or mosque. Or don't. If you must believe, go ahead. I have nothing against Jews, Christians or Moslems.

You are welcome to your beliefs, and I see clearly all the good you do as you draw energy from these faiths. But, please, stop imposing your systems on other people. You have no right to do that!

Every human has the right to choose his or her own way to get through this dangerous time on the planet. Shut your mouth instead of evangelizing, accept God on your own private terms, and leave everyone else alone! Accept the documented truth that whichever major religion you embrace has killed far more people than it ever could "save."

So suck it up and get over it. Cut your self-righteousness; there is nothing special about you because you are a practicing believer.

The religions that appeal to me are far smaller and more modest. They try to convert nobody. They have no arrogance. They are true to the facts.

Tonight, I live as a free man, free from the pollution of religion, but proudly spiritual, embracing of all life. There's nothing special about this. It's called having a beating heart, a thinking mind, and empathy for all others, not just those have happen to practice one narrow ideology (religions are no better than Communism!) or another.

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