Vine Deloria, Jr.
April 25, 2004 by Bill
One of my great joys from the year, 2002, was becoming friends with Vine Deloria. This man has been a hero of mine ever since I read his classic “GOD IS RED”. Called “the flagship book on Native American spirituality.”
In 2002 we were both invited to be speakers at the Frank Waters Centennial Celebration in Taos, New Mexico. When we met it was like I had known this man forever, a kindred spirit who shared the same passions and visions that I have lived with for so many years. A fellow maverick who took to heart the advice of Thomas Jefferson “Your own reason is the only oracle given to you by God.” (Jefferson always used the word “God”, as a Deist, not a biblical Christian.) In bringing truth to falsehood and deceit he has constantly lambasted so called “scholars” and scientists for publishing baloney and hogwash. He would confirm Goethe’s definition of evil, as “militant ignorance”.
Among my favorites of his books are “RED EARTH, WHITE LIES” and “CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS” Or you would enjoy “SPIRIT AND REASON, A VINE DELORIA JR READER.”
Now, with his new book he is taking on the “smug academics” from coast to coast and driving them crazy. It has the title of “EVOLUTION, CREATIONISM, AND OTHER MODERN MYTHS.” Deloria was recently invited by Laura Bush to be a participant in her Literary Festival, attended by over 45,000 people.
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In praise of secularism
April 18, 2004 by Bill
It is no secret that the Bush Administration is engaged in the most Radical assault on the separation of church and state in American history. The apostles of religious correctness never hesitate to broadcast their contempt for the Republic’s secular laws and traditions–whether that means committing the federal government to uphold the “sanctity of marriage,” as the President did in his State of the Union address, or stocking Grand Canyon National Park’s bookstore with fundamentalist tracts claiming that the awe-inspiring canyon was created in six days.
It is equally evident that most Democrats are too terrified of being seen as anti-religious to acknowledge that the very survival of America’s secular government may be at stake in the 2004 election. Howard Dean’s sudden discovery of the value of daily prayer, after being tarred with the dreaded S-word early in the primary season, exemplified the spinelessness of politicians (and others in public life) who fear identification with secularism, nonreligious humanism, even liberal religion–everything once encompassed by the lovely, evocative term freethinking.
Timid twenty-first-century secularists–in sharp contrast to the bold proselytizing re-thinkers of the late nineteenth century–are missing a chance that may never come again if the republicans have four more years to appoint federal judges who share their scorn for secular government.
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Dr. Robert Funk
April 11, 2004 by Bill
Dr. Robert Funk will be speaking at my Sunday Symposium on April 11 th, 10:00 a.m. at the Palm Springs Tennis Club, 701 W. Baristo, valet parking available.
Dr. Funk has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Society of Biblical Literature Fellow at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont. He has also held a fellowship awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies. He has authored over 100 articles published by scholarly journals, as well as a dozen books on biblical studies, including his own grammar for Hellenistic Greek. He has taught at major universities from Vanderbilt to Harvard. His book HONEST TO JESUS, Jesus for a New Millennium, is published by Harper, San Francisco. It is also one of my favorites. The book closes with a revolutionary new vision of Jesus for the next millennium . A Jesus freed from religious and political propaganda and liberated from the cobwebs of orthodoxy.
Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong writes this about the book: “It is a powerful book that will threaten the traditional, uncritical believer, but it will encourage and give hope to the countless millions who are repelled by the theological structures of the past which have imprisoned Jesus.”
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