Loggers’ Lawsuit Over Religion

* So Minnesota loggers have declared that ecology is a religion and say that the U.S. government is violating the Constitution by making decisions favorable to “religious” environmental concerns (Nov. 29). Seems to me that it opens the door to a suit against the U.S. government on the grounds that capitalism is a religion.

Capitalism imposes its comprehensive belief system onto everyone and everything it can get its claws into and stifles by all means necessary any other belief system it encounters. Capitalism has a deity: the “invisible hand” that keeps the world moving in accordance with the inviolate rules of the sacred “market.” It has an ecclesiastic hierarchy consisting of banker and financier cardinals at the top, politician priests, judges and scholars of the economic canon in the middle and the great, genuflecting rest of us at the bottom. Capitalism has creeds and commandments (Thou shalt devour). It has holy wars, complete with sacrificial deaths and triumphant corporate resurrections. It even has chrism: extremely holy oil, without which hallowed blessing nothing can function. Capitalism sure sounds like a religion to me.

Another lawsuit, anyone?

LAUREL HALL

La Habra

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Does this mean that I can now commit murder and get away with it by claiming that “thou shalt not kill” imposes on my religious freedom as an atheist? On the other hand, if said loggers would like to publicly forgo a portion of the oxygen that plants produce, we might be able to cut a deal.

TIM LYNCH

Van Nuys