From: Suzanne Taylor
To: Peggy DoBreer, Center for the Advancement of Nonviolence
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 7:49 PM
Subject: help me strategize

I'm doing a little fishing here. Madeleine [Schwab] gave me the Curriculum Guide for A Season for Nonviolence, in which Gandhi's Eight Blunders of the World struck me. My latest "find" in the world would be a wonderful speaker related to something I found there:

"Religion has been reduced to meaningless rituals practiced mindlessly. Temples, churches, synagogues, mosques, and those entrusted with the duty of interpreting religion to lay people seek to control through fear of hell, damnation, and purgatory. In the name of God they have spawned more hate and violence than any government. True religion is based on spirituality, love, compassion, understanding, and appreciation of each other whatever our beliefs may be – Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists, Agnostics or whatever, Gandhi believed whatever labels we put on our faith ultimately all of us worship Truth because Truth is God. Superficially we may be very devout believers and make a tremendous public show of our worship, but if that belief, understanding, compassion, love and appreciation is not translated into our lives, prayers will have no meaning."

Here's what I just wrote in response to a request that I give five action ideas for getting us out of the mess we are in in the world:

GET JOE SIMONETTA FRONT AND CENTER

Speaking of changing mass consciousness, this is another way. Popularize the ideas in Seven Words That Can Change the World – essentially to throw out religions and replace them with "humanistic environmentalism." Get Joe Simonetta, the author of this book, who speaks compellingly, out there. Here's the review I posted on amazon.com:

Seven Words That Can Change the World is a revolutionary book, a sense making body of thought for the next reality at a time when we desperately need new insights and understandings to wrench us from a situation where the world is so dangerously at the brink. The book takes us from the furthest out, which is beyond the beyond in the cosmos, to the furthest in, which is where we can see obvious new mandates for playing the game of life. It's so heretical that I hope the author doesn't get in trouble with the Church – in fact, with all systems of worship. He could put them all out of business – or put them in a new business, as places where people turn to each other and not to the great beyond.

This book takes on the givens on which religions are based, and, instead of a figure to worship or to emulate and an old story to be guided by, it inescapably brings the responsibility for our lives home to ourselves in the recognition of the intertwining of everyone at every moment in a oneness in which we all play a part. There can be no clash of belief systems, no wars for whose ideas or whose godhead has the goods, no one to be punished by, no one to placate or to please or to cheat in the reordering of reality that this book provides; instead, we are brought to a universal understanding that we need nothing external to keep us in line, and that, therefore, there isn't any way to lapse or fail or sin in any eyes other than our own and each other's. We are free agents, bound by the fundamental realties of existence, where the good life is in honoring life itself – in making ourselves healthy, our relationships kind, and our environment well tended. This is a big growing up we are invited into, and the inescapable logic of it can't fail to wake us up to a new reality. This simple little book may be the most profound read since the holy books of yore.

Peggy, you can go further into what Joe is taking about in the conversation with him that I posted on my 9/11 Website.

Can you help me strategize about where Joe could be speaking? He is great at it – in fact, I have a tape of a recent speech he made if anyone wants to hear it. Is there a connection we have with the Gandhi Institute? Another venue is Agape.

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