Top
WES Logo Homepage Link

Join the Quest

Welcome to this special place on the path to spiritual reality. Here, you will find wisdom, insight into the nature of spiritual authenticity, and the encouragement to think for yourself and form a centered, rational, informed perspective on spirituality and religion.

William Edelen has spent his life in courageous pursuit of the historical truth about religion. Basing his research on facts, not popular opinions or religious dogma, he stands for accuracy.

Bill was a Marine Pilot for 12 years during WW II and the Korean War, where he learned his love of reading and scholarship. Earning advanced degrees in anthropology and theology, he taught at the university level, where his classes were always popular. Among his many learned friends were Buckminster Fuller, Walter Annenberg and Joseph Campbell. It was Joseph Campbell who recommended to Bill that he keep pointing people “Toward the Mystery.”

You will find many surprising historical truths in his inspiring lectures and columns, such as the fact that the first six presidents of the United States were not Christians – they were Deists and Humanists and were against the church being involved with government.

Join William Edelen as he presents the documented origins of religious beliefs, mythologies, traditions, and ceremonies, as well as introduces the stimulating spiritual philosophies of some of the world’s greatest minds in modern times and throughout history.

My heroes

March 7, 2010

E=mc2 image with heavensTwo men, my heroes, who had a driving passion to free human beings from religious superstition, are Steven Weinberg and Albert Einstein.

Dr. Steven Weinberg is one of the true, authentic Renaissance men of our time. He has been called the “Einstein” of our day. He won the Nobel Prize for uniting the electro-magnetic and the weak nuclear forces into a single force. He is a founding director of the Jerusalem Winter School of Theoretical Physics, is on the Council of Scholars – the Library of Congress, he holds honorary doctoral degrees from major universities all over the world. He taught at MIT and Harvard. Nobody since Loren Eiseley and Lewis Thomas has written so beautifully, turning science into poetry.

He recently was awarded the Lewis Thomas prize, given to the scholar who “best embodies the scientist as poet.” He prefaced his acceptance speech by saying, “what a joy to be at a meeting that does not start with an invocation.” He went on to say that the great passion of his life, with science, was to free human beings from the superstition of religion, and he continued:

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. Science should be taught ignoring religion. One of the social functions of science is to free humans from superstition.

“The entire history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions, wars, and crusades. I hope this long sad story, fueled by the progression of priests, ministers and rabbis, will come to an end. If science can contribute to this end, it will be the most important contribution we can make, that we see no more of priests, ministers, and rabbis.

“Religion is complete nonsense and terribly damaging to human civilization. As Voltaire said,  ‘Religion began when the first knave met the first fool.’ Knaves today empower themselves by perpetuating ignorance and glorifying stupidity, like Billy Graham who says ‘science is the trouble’ or the Pope who says ‘technology will be the ruin of mankind,’ at the same time both benefit to the maximum from science and technology.”

In a beautiful profile on Weinberg, the New York Times, several years ago, made note of the fact that he lost all of his mother’s family in the holocaust, has a brilliant wife who is a professor of Law at the University of Texas, and that he is so sensitive he “cannot hear La Boheme without dissolving.”

Read the story »

Recent Columns

Bottom