 |
| |
| |
To read a PDF of the book free, click here
To purchase a paperback or hardback edition, select an option below:
Amazon.com
Paperback click
here
Hardback click
here
FROM THE FOREWORD
The purpose of this book is to descibe a credible, modern religion – a religion based on the appreciation, care, and enhancement of life itself, while it embraces individual freedom as a precious part of the natural expression of life. Free of superstition, it seeks to be entirely in agreement with truth as we know it and regards that imposing value as more than beauty; it is sacred – and no truth more so than that on which we base our religion.
Let us begin with what we know for certain: we have life. Then let us derive from that foundational reality all of our beliefs. I suggest that the basic tenet of such a religion would be Faith In Life – a trust in its greatness and logic – and that it contains within it the religious expression of Faith Through Life, that through the natural care and fulfillment of life we may not only preserve it and find considerate joy in it but also express our truest reverence to its ultimate source.
SELECTION
LIFE ITSELF AS OUR FUNDAMENTAL VALUE
In our exploration of values, we have generally taken life for granted and gone on to discuss values that are aspects of it, such as Plato’s explorations of justice and love or Aristotle’s of reason and happiness, when, in fact, none of these values would exist, at least, as a human experience, without life itself. We are sensitive to the natural growth of knowledge, but we also know that earlier thinkers could commit such an oversight, while causing less damage than we may, when life is, moment to moment, threatened with self-inflicted mass extinction.
Values of peace and love, freedom and fairness, achievement and environmentalism, are all consonant aspects of an intelligent commitment to life.
Let us stitch a message of natural salvation on the tattered fabric of our troubled lives: Life itself as our shared religion.
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
To read a PDF of the book free, click here
To purchase a paperback or hardback edition, select an option below:
Amazon.com
Paperback click
here
Hardback click
here
FROM THE FOREWORD
Book Two contains poetry inspired by the belief that, when we appreciate life as we have come to understand it, as a biological astonishment that invites our devoted care, we can find all the beliefs we need – for our finite needs and our infinite longings – in life itself.
THREE SELECTED POEMS
IF I GREW UP ON THE MOON
If I grew up on the moon
And saw the blue-white earth
Enshrined in the evening sky,
I'd know where heaven is.
THESE ARE THE POEMS I WROTE
These are the poems I wrote
In an endangered time,
In the service of life –
Irreplaceable, fragile,
And, appreciated as we
Have come to understand it,
The holiest existent we can know.
SCIENTIFICAT
Science, be my guide and guardian:
Lead me to the side
Where thought and truth are one;
Protect me from the pressing
Errors of former times;
Shield me from ignorance with authority –
Simple, sad, and stifling;
Help me fulfill my finest possibilities;
Rescue me from the grip of sickness
And harbor me in rougher times;
Allow me to discover how Creation works,
Solve the questions of what and how
And one day, perhaps, the very why of life.
|
|
|
|
