Bill taught me to think outside of the mainstream in many areas. You think monotheism is superior to polytheism? Bill would say, what do you know about polytheism, or for that matter monotheism? You assume monotheism is superior because it presumes to have a single order to the world, a single unifying logic and force, but what does this force represent?
Bill taught me that polytheistic religions often had a better attitude toward nature than did the monotheistic ones. In Amerindian religions, there were spirits of the forest, of the canopy, of the deep woods, of the gurgling spring, and each captured aspects unique to these ecological zones.
For someone like Bill, who had literally lived 15 to 20 years of his life in the woods, these distinctions were so much closer to his own view than that emerging from monotheism, which basically boiled down to a form of species-advantage reasoning.
We are all living organisms—make discriminatory comments about others at your own risk.
