Listening to "The Telling"

"There are no native Akan words for God, gods, the divine," she told her noter. "The Corporation bureaucrats made up a word for God and installed state theism when they learned that a concept of deity was important on the worlds they took as models. They saw that religion is a useful tool for those in power. But there was no native theism or deism here. On Aka, god is a word without referent. No capital letters. No creator. Only creation. No eternal father to reward and punish, justify injustice, ordain cruelty, offer salvation. Eternity not an endpoint, but a continuity. Primal division of being into material and spiritual only as two-as-one in two aspects. No hierchy of Nature and Supernatural. No binary Dark/Light, Evil/Good, or Body/Soul. No heavens, no hells. The Akan system is a spiritual discipline with spiritual goals, but they're exactly the same goals it seeks for bodily and ethical well-being. ....if the Telling was a religion, it was very different from Terran religions since it entirely lacked dogmatic belief, emotional frenzy, defferal of reward to a future life, and sanctioned bigotry."

~Ursula Le Guin, "The Telling"