Proud to be known as liberal

I have often heard myself referred to as “liberal”. I cannot tell you how proud I am to be known by that classification. It is one of the most beautiful and cherished words in our language. It has nothing to do with whether you are a Republican or Democrat, a Unitarian, Presbyterian or Congregationalist. It has to do with an attitude…a frame of mind…an orientation to life and events…a philosophy…a concept having to do with freedom.

Liberal and liberty both have the same root…defined in “Websters Dictionary” as…”The quality or state of being free…as a freeman…a free person…as opposed to slavery, bondage and subjection…worthy of a person of free birth…not servile or mean…a noble way…generous…open-handed…free from bigotry…inclined to welcome new ideas.”

If liberalism is that which liberates…which sets free the minds, spirits and bodies of human beings…then how proud I am to be known as one who is dedicated to such a noble concept.
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Born again atheists

My friend Herb Caen, the late Pulitzer Prize columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, made the following observation in one of his weekly columns…”the trouble with ‘born agains’ is that they are a bigger pain in the ass the second time around.”

Well, here is an interesting thought to go with your morning coffee. If we were REALLY born again, we would return to atheism. We would all be atheists. Why? Because that is the way we were born the first time around. Every baby that comes into this world has no belief in God…Goddesses…Jesus…Buddha…Lao-Tzu…Shiva…Muhammad or anything else until such time as we brainwash, indoctrinate, threaten, or coerce them into some adult belief system, usually the same one we were brainwashed into as children. Religious beliefs are an accident of birth.

Through acculturation and enculturation we become something other than what we were at birth. The only reason you are a Methodist Christian is that you were born in America. I used to ask the students in my university class “why are you a Methodist Christian”? And they would say something like this “because my parents were Methodists and they made me go to Sunday school and church with them from the time I was born.”.. Then I would say “right…you are an enculturated Methodist Christian…you did not choose to be that….you were born into it.”
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The birth of love

It has been almost universal in religious mythologies that love brought truth out of falsehood…light out of darkness…order out of chaos. In Egyptian literature is the concept of love being divine and overcoming all things. In Babylonian literature love is always stronger than death and overcomes all things. “The inability to give love…or receive love…is insanity” wrote Dr. Karl Menninger of the world famous Menninger psychiatric center.

Where…when…how did this sublime experience enter the human heart?

Thousands and thousands of years before Jesus was born or the bible was written, love filled human hearts and dreamed of immortality. Maybe even a million or more years ago, perhaps on an African savannah at the dawn of humanity, an ancestor stood, staring into space past a new grave…and a first tear filled eyes.

Whence came that first tear flowing out of a heart having experienced love? Whence came that first sob in the throat…but from the source of love…that which is eternal? And today, still, the mystery of life and death remain. Life…so called…is only a brief interlude between two great mysteries which are yet ONE.
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