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These are my religious and spiritual beliefs. Why do you think I’m stupid and why do you hate me? [1]

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Date: 2022-10-03

That little red dot in the bottom left is me.

Gabby and I shared Christmas Dinner last year with another fully vaccinated and boosted couple who are close friends. They are devout Pentecostals. They have served as faith leaders in various remote locations in Canada’s North and are now retired.

Late on in the evening I got up to leave the table and had savage cramps in both calves. This is an ongoing issue. I haven’t always treated my body well and I have had recurring bouts of sciatica in each leg and on rare occasions both legs as result of a series of back injuries I suffered during my athletic career. Calf cramps are one symptom of my sciatica.

Our friends offered to pray over me. I was intrigued and said sure. The laying on of hands and praying lasted about ten minutes. Did I feel better, yes. But then again standing up often reduces my active sciatic pain symptoms.

They invited me to come check out their church. I didn’t take them up on their offer because my entire spine seemed very unhappy with me and sitting on a hard surface just makes all of my symptoms worse. I am doing physiotherapy, Watsu and WATA, swimming, and have returned to tai chi and yoga classes after two+ years away because of Covid.

However, I didn’t forget their offer and did go to several services this past month. I feel kindly disposed to the current pastor after he used his consider powers of persuasion to get thousands of vaccine resistors to get poked. One service was just a get to know you session. The other the Pastor urged people to pray for me while he did a laying on of hands over me.

My back hasn’t hurt since but then consider all the other proven treatments I have been undergoing. I can tell you this, it felt very weird at the time. I was tingly and warm and so relaxed I nearly fell asleep. That relaxation lasted until the next day.

I maybe should say I love trying new religions, even for extended periods. I spent a year teaching in Appalachia and was a member of a snake handling church that entire time. My family and I spent a year in Senegal and lived with the female leader of a mosque of the Muslim Sisterhood (Sufis). She was also a healer who used an amazing pharmacopoeia of native plants.

My parents actually got me started trying out different religions. When I hit puberty my parents told me I no longer had to go to church. They had decided to stop going themselves. They shared with me their reasons for abandoning organized religion and the United Church of Canada in particular. However, they did ask me, before I stopped all together to attend services in other churches and other faiths. I honored their request trying out Anglican, Episcopalian, Catholic, Baptist, Mennonite Brethren, and Buddhist churches. I then came back to the United Church of Canada of my own volition and stayed until I was in my second year of university. That is when I realized I didn’t know if God was real or not and became an agnostic.

I was driven by my revulsion at the role of the United Church of Canada in the horror that was the Residential School System.

I was an agnostic for 10 years and an atheist for the following five years. For about half of that time I remained a cultural Christian. Cultural Christians don’t have faith but enjoy the rituals and music of their chosen faith and thus continue to attend church. About a third of atheist scientists are cultural Christians. In fact it was atheist scientists who remained culturally Christian who convinced me I was actually an atheist and should identify myself as such.

During my agnostic and atheist years I moved 9 times. I went from Edmonton, Alberta on a journey around the world: West Germany, Israel, Cyprus, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Calgary, Alberta, Tibet, and back to Edmonton where I joined the United Brethren. We were/are Anabaptists. I became a devout Christian, the kind who goes to church every week, does guest sermons, leads fundraising drives, and plays accompaniment for the choir.

Last year we merged with the United Church of Canada and I decided to go along with the merger. I am now back in the Church I grew up in. But the Church has grown up in the years I was away. Not only has the United Church accepted and apologized to Indigenous people it has made at least partial reparations. It has always been pro-women and pro-abortion since the 1930s and has in the years since spread its support to the LGBQT2S community and racialized communities including Indigenous rights and Black Lives Matter. It is pro science, supports evolution, and recognizes we must care for the environment.

The members of the United Church of Canada act for peace, justice, care for creation, and God’s mission of healing the whole world in cooperation with others who share our vision. The Church also adamantly supports the idea that there is no place for religion in politics while encouraging members to vote and participate in the political life of the nation.



As members of the Church we are called to Deep Spirituality, Bold Discipleship, and Daring Justice. The United Church of Canada is often called the Church of the NDP. The NDP is Canada’s socialist political party.

My own deep spirituality has nothing to do with Christianity but that doesn’t disqualify me from membership in the United Church of Canada but it does shape my life. From the time that I was 12 I have been learning and training in the animist and pagan beliefs, traditions, and practices of my Indigenous family and training to be a healer in these traditions. This is an ongoing process and I am sure it will continue until my last moment on Earth.

Simply put, and I have learned our traditional ways reflect an immense complexity, we believe not only that everything is alive but that everything, rocks, rivers, the sky, the sun, the stars, all living things and everything else is part of a vast web and is actually one thing. And that is the simplified version. These ideas underlie my life, my radical environmentalism, my regenerative ranching and farming, my being a scientist, a Natural Historian, my desire to heal and help rather than fight, to include rather than exclude.

As an example, the military trained me to be a highly lethal killer. My animist beliefs greatly limited my desire to kill on command. Instead the military gave me the opportunity to be sent on Humanitarian and Peacekeeping missions. I started by removing mines, IEDs, and bombs making things much safer for local people. From there I moved to providing emergency medicine, public health infrastructure and obstetric and gynecological health services to local people.

It is also from my animist spiritual system that my motivation to work on the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Peasants. The first task was to get them passed by the UN, the second task was to get them adopted by the Governments of Canada and the United States of America. We are now working on the third step, getting them turned into meaningful legislation. It also drives my work trying to get the 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada implemented.

My Christian faith gives me tools, social and cultural beliefs that help me try to make the world a better place. I find many allies in Progressive Christianity. I find peace and calm in attending church services. The church and my Christian faith is my rock on those days I feel like I am close to drowning in a sea of despair.

My spiritual and religious practices are not clothes I slip in and out of they are my skin, my heart, and my soul.

At this moment I am busy following my religious instruction to take part in the political life of the nation. I am working to get expats and Dual Citizens in Alberta registered and now to get them to vote the entire Democratic ballot wherever in America they vote. I am also working on my friends, relatives, business partners, suppliers, and buyers in Montana to vote Democratic.

I am also working on three overtly political projects that matter in Canada. In one we’ve taken over a once ultra right wing political party and are turning it into a non-partisan bastion of civility and non adversarial politics. Another is part of an attempt to reinvigorate the Green Party of Canada. The final project is with our Marxist-Leninist club where we find good people, encourage them to run for grass roots political office, and then support their election campaigns.

I hope this gives you some idea of my religious and spiritual beliefs and how they play out in my life.

Now I am going to ask again. Why is you think I am stupid and why do you hate me?

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