This Goes Out

This goes out to those for whom:

Religion is violence backed by divinity.

Religion is a backward step in human evolution.

Religion kills joy.

Religion is why you can’t talk to your family.

Religion is the state of being hopelessly stuck.

Religion is brainwash.

Religion is the old relative who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

Religion is a cage around reason.

Religion is the thorn in the side of common sense.

Religion will not house complexity, mystery, the unknown, or contradiction.

Religion represents death of the imagination, invention, and seeing yourself in someone else.

Religion is the elaborate disguise for Fear that gets him a seat at the table of survival.

This also goes out to those for whom:

Religion is peace backed by divinity.

Religion is a forward step in human evolution.

Religion gives joy.

Religion is the call to somehow honor and revere your family.

Religion sings songs to the silenced and forgotten.

Religion illuminates the invisible threads of cosmic connection.

Religion is the moral memory of humankind.

Religion is an ancient intelligence summoning us to choose humility over hubris and love over fear.

Religion dresses the wounds of alienation, isolation, oppression, desertion, haste, and hierarchy.

Religion is the lexicon of mystery.

Religion brings the dead back to tell stories.

Religion is the library of love and longing, candor and liveliness.

I’m going to try to refrain from letting any post/newsletter serve exclusively as an advertisement for my marketed efforts. But the above work (which I’d love to think of as poem) is the opening bid of a book that’s a multi-paragraph attempt to keep the reader following what I take to be a catastrophically unpopular argument. Please consider procuring a copy. If you’re in Nashville and you’d like a signed volume brought to you on a bicycle OR if you’d like me to mail you one or more for a small fee, lemme know.

Richard Rohr offered a very kind blurb:

"Effectively skewering a central fallacy of the age, David Dark argues that at the deepest level no one is more or less religious than anyone else. With his premise granted, new avenues for ownership, responsibility and a renewed attentiveness to all we say, do and think arise. Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious is a call to consciousness and the compassion that accompanies the sacred insight that the whole world is kin and everything belongs."