Go Hug a Tree........

I like to call myself a "Tree Huger" from time to time when folks ask if I am religious. I always get the same look... 'what does that have to do with religion???'

Well for me, being into nature IS Spirituality. For me, our Big Blue Planet is the only Church I need, with the open sky being the most beautiful Cathedral ceiling that could ever exist.

Nurturing our planet is our duty, whether you believe in Buddha or Christ, or in no God at all.

Pollution, extinction, consumption of limited resources.... affect us all in one way or another. You can't escape it.

It is every single human beings responsibility to take care of the only home we share with millions of other species.

Every child that goes to school should be taught how to care for the planet with the same emphasis as they are taught to brush their teeth, learn how to spell, read and know math.

Nurturing the environment teaches children empathy and compassion, respect, discipline, and self worth.

It teaches Science through gardening and composting and water conservation.

It teaches them about math and money and the economy by seeing how pollution and weather effects crops....


Man and nature have always been in a battle. We have always tried to fight against it, but we need to do the opposite... we need to work with it...
Man and nature can and must coexist. If we don't..... it's actually not the Planet that will suffer first.... we will...

If we poison the air & water and ruin the Land.... we will die first... and truth be told, the Planet will go on without us! It just won't harbor any life....

We only hurt ourselves and take the rest of life with us by not taking care of the planet.... so regardless of your Religion or back ground or politics.... Go Hug a Tree....:D

The "Spiritual Atheist"

I have ALWAYS considered my self a "spiritual " person. For a period, I believed in God. But as many children in our society, I was "conditioned" to believe in God. God was in my school via a pledge to my country, on money, related to me everyday by all kinds of people..... it's just the way it was.

As I matured and really started to question life, the concept of a "Super Natural Being" just seemed more and more bizarre to me. Yet I still "felt" this spirituality inside the very core of my being. It was deep and it WAS THERE.... I could not deny it.

It's taken me a long time to come up with a phrase that I feel best describes this seemingly contradictory existence..... "Spiritual Atheism"

For me, this means that I am a conscientious, moral, peace loving, good will seeker, who believes that we are all connected to each other, but more significantly... connected to the Universe itself.

We are, as everyone knows, a mix of chemicals and minerals, made from elements that are abundant on our planet and in our Universe. But there is also something MORE to us ....

I firmly believe that there is a type of energy (for lack of a better word) that gives us that "feeling" , that sense of "spirituality" that "inner knowledge" that there is more to our short little stay here on earth as human beings.

I will elaborate more on this another day, but for now I want to leave you with the idea that there is an alternative to being either religious or being an atheist. There is something in between those two extremes in a shade of gray....

This "shade of gray" is what I want to explore and hope it's one you explore as well... and that you find the same peacefulness I have discovered by being a spiritual atheist...

Why So Many Different Religions???

Hasn't it ever crossed your mind? I am sure it has. Do you think your religion is the only true religion and the rest are fools? Or do you not believe in any religion, but feel that there is something... something bigger then just individual unconnected objects?

I was raised a Catholic. I believed in God until I was in my early 20's. It was at that point in my life, that I started seeing the world as a whole, and yet religion seemed to divide everyone.

Religion made less and less sense for me. Yet at the same time I knew that there was something connecting everything... something big.... something that was actually bigger than religion. Bigger because it existed not only in people, but in animals and plants and mountains and the air and so on and so on.

In the past twenty years, I have come to think of religion as a form of "expression" for something people feel inside their being. As primitive man felt this, it was our nature to explain it.

Independently, people all over the world took this inner feeling of there being something beyond our bodies, and from it, we created Gods and Goddesses and Mythical beings and God like animal spirits.

We felt connected to the heavens, and found ways to celebrate and honor that feeling.

Only problem is that as one group came up with their own unique way to express the awesomeness they felt inside their "inner being"... another group was coming up with their version.... which led to people fighting over who was right, and who had the "true" religion.

Here's my observation.... maybe it's not "God" we feel. Maybe it's a pure type of energy that coarses through us, and everything that exists in the entire universe, and when we connect to it, it makes us feel euphoric.

For me... I have found so much comfort by thinking in this way. Religion has it's good points, but it's one major downfall, is that it divides us... to the most extreme base, where we fight to the death over it.

Aren't we smarter than this???

I'll leave you to think about this..... more to come.....

Life in the Ocean and Our DNA

I watched a program about a group of scientists who are taking samples of water from all the oceans around the world.

It's called the Ocean Genome Voyage

They are trying to collect and identify DNA from the smallest of creatures, some microscopic. There is already information on most sea life, but only three or four types of microscopic life in the ocean has had its DNA documented. In their search, they have identified more than 1,800 new microscopic creatures. I can't tell you about all the technical stuff involving how they will go about mapping out the DNA of all these new found creatures, it's a subject all in itself. But, as I watched them talking about how individual strands of DNA from these new found creatures shared the same bits of information with all life, I felt sort of "at one" with everything.

I am not a religious person, but I am a spiritual person. Spiritual in the sense that I believe everything is connected by some type of energy. I just don't believe in a superior being. But I do believe that everything in the universe is all connected. I don't know, maybe you could argue that nature, and science IS my religion....

I only bring this up because I think it's time for people to start looking at the world through different eyes.

When you think for example, that because of this project in the ocean, (just to identify DNA of life there) which then inadvertently "stumbles upon" 7,000 new creatures, you can't help but think that if there are that many creatures we didn't know about.... right here in our oceans, right here on our tiny planet... what other life must exist in the universe!

For me, all religion goes out the window with that kind of realization. We share the same bits of DNA with microscopic life... period. Microscopic life that has NO RELIGION. But yet we are connected.... pretty cool huh?