Wrapping up Murchie, Moving to Gary Paul Nabhan

It has been an interesting week with Guy Murchie. Our Spirit & Sustainability weekly group grew to six people, with new conversationalists Dr. Jim Tucker and Mr. Chuck Mehan in the mix. This week, on Oct. 5 at 8:30 a.m. at Stone Cup Cafe, we will wrap up Murchie as best we can, leaving him only for reference as we move to Gathering the Desert by Gary Paul Nabhan the next week.

Murchie has set Wade Swicord off into pleasant imaginings of universal consciousness and new energy resources for Chattanooga. Wade would like Chattanooga to be the world leader in alternate energy.

Murchie has drawn me closer to an Aristotelian-based Christian-Hindu consciousness (I am thinking, of course, of the noosphere). For Murchie is a scientist and a mystic of sorts, so much closer to the Pythagorean anima mundi, as well as the Hindu atman, than we might believe.

Evidently, our conversation on Murchie's mysteries last week had a reflective effect for Jim Tucker, who sent me David James Duncan's "What Fundamentalists Need for Their Salvation." Duncan starts with his own Seventh-Day Adventist background and its "fear-based" faith and moves into his "leaving the faith" phase. In this essay (sometimes polemic?), Ducan dissects the 24-hour business of right-wing politics, which encodes fundamentalist religiosity into Republican/Independent politics. I like Duncan's summing up of this business: The "Christian Right's" fully-automated evangelical machine runs twenty-four hours a day--like McDonald's, Coca Cola and Exxon-Mobil--making converts globally. But to what? The conversion industry's notion of the word Christian has substituted a "Rapture Index" and Armageddon fantasy for Christ's interior kingdom of heaven and love of neighbor; it is funded by donors lured by a televagelical "guarantee" of "a hundredfold increase on all financial donations," as if Mark 10:30 were an ad for a financial pyramid scheme and Jesus never said, "Sell all thou hast and distribute it unto the poor."