begins like this:
"The Lord is my shepherd" is a beautiful psalm, but people are tired of being sheep. Fewer are willing to do whatever the priest, rabbi, or minister tells them.... Fewer want to curtail their sexual interests because a celibate or a sexually repressed or obsessed cleric tells them to. Fewer women want to remain second-class observers to a male-hierarchy."
Parts of formal religion rankle many of us. And yet, Thomas Moore's book is about--forgive the cliche--not throwing the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bath water.
Once I told Carlene that I didn't believe some of the things I had grown up believing. Without a whiff of judgment or discomfort, she said, "That's like I drive a Buick and you drive a Mini Cooper." Or--in her famous philosophy of life: "People are different."
The roots of my childhood religion are twofold.
In my family, we went to the First Baptist Church twice on Sunday and again on Wednesday nights. Our variety of "Baptist-ness" was an easy-going and optimistic container for growing up in. We had stained glass windows, hymns we all knew by heart, and sermons that featured more love than fear.
The family I married into was a different strain of Baptist. I met my future-husband at Evergreen Baptist, one of those small wooden churches "out in the country" when my daddy was leading the music for a summer revival. Those folks served the best sugar-laden and fried foods anywhere. But the sermons could scare you to death with visions of Hell.
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