Who is the more spiritual person? The woman out on a Sunday morning excursion for coffee and a newspaper who swerves to avoid hitting a dog, or is it, the man who hits the dog in his haste to get to church on time? Who knows? My point is that going to church has absolutely nothing to do with being a good person.

Questions about religion have always troubled me. I decided to do research to find some answers. The book Spiritual Clarity contains my discoveries. Spiritual Clarity is easy to understand and does not attempt to influence its readers. Writing it has empowered me and led me to a conclusion that I feel good about.

My hope is that someday everyone will achieve spiritual clarity and we will eventually have a more peaceful world. It may take a while, but that is my wish. The path to peace is religious tolerance, realizing that your neighbors thoughts are just as important as yours. People need to get past the absolute thinkingstate of mind; that they belong to the one true religion and everyone else is wrong.

To achieve spiritual clarity the first step is to get a basic but more extensive view of what others believe. We also need to just not passively hope for a more peaceful world but to actually do something. Each little step in the right direction helps. These small steps may be donating blood, becoming an organ donor, becoming a bone marrow donor, volunteering at an animal shelter, volunteering at the local elementary school, buying a goat from Heifer International which gives the donated animal to a family somewhere in the world that needs it, giving a child a home that desperately needs a home, adopting a pet or sending money or goods to those who need it. Sending money to a church, so people as well off as yourself can have a place to go on Sundays, is not the same thing. Churches do a lot of beneficial things for charity, but sometimes that seems to be such a small part of church when it should be the main focus. Kindness does count. Just think about what would happen if all the money collected in collection plates around the country on Sundays was used to buy food for the hungry...starvation could be ended. Or if it was used to buy medication for AIDS patients in Africa.

In regard to helping others achieve spiritual clarity, I assume that I am not the only one dissatisfied with the knowledge that I had about spirituality and religion. Almost all of the people I talked to just believed as they were told to believe, so I think it would benefit many to do some reading and discover what is out there. Who wants to be categorized with the attorney in the Scopes trial who said, he does not think about what he does not think about? It is a perfect choice to think differently about some things and it is also a perfect choice to believe what you have been told, providing there is a tolerance for other thought processes.

Maybe we, as a whole, can be open to new things and come to the realization that things might not be as they seem. Tolerance, acceptance, and questioning are good thing. Life is wonderful and we need to experience it all, not just our own little corner of the world.