Old Turtle by Douglas Wood

This was a nice book on diversity. I think one of the things people get the most worked up over is spirituality. It's one of those things that can touch a person more deeply than anything else, and everyone's perspective will differ, even if only minutely.

This book starts off with animals and rocks and trees each telling each other what they think god is, and each being's god seems to resemble the speaker. Then the old turtle stops them and tells them that a new group of species is coming, humans, and these humans are meant to be a message from god. The people come and everything is going well, but after some time, they begin acting in a not so nice way and nature tells them to stop. At this point, all of the rocks and trees and other beings that had said god was like themselves at the beginning of the book, began saying that they were able to see god in others, in what was actually the opposite of what they previously said. I guess the moral would be to have an open mind about that which is different from yourself, because it really isn't so alien to what you believe.