Daughter of God - Hardcover

Growing up as a Southern Presbyterian I became increasingly disenchanted as I reached adolescence. When I began to get involved with the civil rights movement in the 1960s,I quickly saw how religion - not just in The South but globally - had become a handy instrument of social control, with scriptures and holy books carefully distorted and sorted through to find those that justified racial and sexual oppression and a religious chauvinism that excluded other faiths as righteous.

My civil rights activities quickly alienated me - a white teenager - from most of my friends. But I quickly had another set of cohorts - mostly black or Jewish - whose backgrounds and culture were at first foreign and in the end, liberating and enlightening.

I developed a deep curiosity about religion that fed voraciously on college courses in religion and philosophy. I grew to understand that like corporations, governments and other institutions, churches develop their own bureaucracies, self-sustaining momentum and a hunger for power that make them act in their own self interest and cause them to lose sight of their primary focus: ministering to the spiritual well-being of their congregations.

From this, it was easy to see that the religious strife in the world is not a battle among believers, but instead are conflicts fueled by the bureaucratic, political and cultural ambitions of church and political leaders hell-bent on pushing their own personal agendas of power and glory. They are blindly unashamed to commit the ultimate blasphemy: that of using God to further their own ambition.

Church leaders and their political allies have lied, killed, maimed, mutilated, coerced, threatened and waged holy wars to consolidate their power. They have twisted scriptures and rewritten history to make their points. And all of them have disenfranchised women despite the fact that people have view God as a woman for far longer in human history than it has seen God as a man.

Indeed, the all-powerful Creator of the universe and all within it is far too infinite to be either male or female and seeing God only as a man is, itself, idolatrous and blasphemous.

Daughter of God is my way of looking at all this. I have written it as a thriller because that is the most fun this writer can have at a keyboard. I hope my deep abiding love for the subject comes through for every reader.