We don't need any gurus like M. We need to believe in ourselves. I wonder if we should point out that we do respect bona fide religious paths, as well as secular orientations -- it is up to each individual. Not trying to sound politically correct, just trying to share some thoughts about it all.

I'd give a history of that term "politically correct" but it would be politically incorrect to do so... and I'm already off the reservation. (Suffice to say that it originated in Stalinist USSR, and those about whom it wes merely whispered that they might be "incorrect" were frequently lost, even to their family's memory. In other words, it means something far more disturbing than mere conformity.)

But here's a statement that for its time, or any time, seems both a bonafide spiritual and non-derivative expression of political incorrectness:

I Celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,
nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either,
nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
....

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,
he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
....

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Whitman first published Leaves of Grass just before the Civil War, at his own expense, and it was extended and re-published nine times over the next forty years until his death. Although he found an audience Whitman was anything but well received by all. He was fired from numerous jobs as a journalist for his naked advocacy of ideas that put sovereignty over comfort and stability. Reviewers called his writings "a stupid mass of filth." He did not suffer fools gladly either, and had little tolerance for the politically correct appeasers of his day, choosing to support the bloodiest war ever fought in this hemisphere for the sake of a purely abstract idea. The poem makes a good comparison, therefore, to that other "religious/scriptural" justification for war that you brought up: The Gita.

The poem was prescient in the sense that it celebrated an abstraction with substance, knowing that the grass waving peacefully, each leaf a seeming law unto itself in the antebellum breezes, would soon be caught up and destroyed in a cause that their very existence made inescapable.