Fridge Notes

In the discussion time of my Sunday Symposium, we have a small ritual. When anyone says something worth remembering, we say, “That’s for your refrigerator door.” Most everyone has a fridge door full of notes. Here are a few educational gems for the “religion” section of your door.

• “Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich.” Ambrose Bierce, “An Atheist’s Dictionary”
• “The last time we mixed religion and government, people were burned at the stake.” Anonymous
• “Theology: The study of elaborate verbal disguises for non-ideas.” H.L. Mencken
• “If something called ‘God’ is beyond human comprehension, then theology is a pseudo-science without a subject matter.” William Edelen
• “The Government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion.” President George Washington in the Treaty of Tripoli
• “This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.” President John Adams in The Jefferson-Adams letters
• “I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature. It has made one half the world fools, the other half hypocrites.” President Thomas Jefferson
• “The bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.” President Abraham Lincoln to the Washington D.C. clergy
• “A just government has no need for the clergy or the church. The fruits of Christianity are pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, and in both clergy and laity, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” President James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. From his address before the General Assembly of Virginia, 1785
• “The first clergyman was the first sly rogue who encountered the first fool.” Voltaire
• “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” Mark Twain
• “The bible has some poetry, some blood drenched history, a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a hundred thousand lies.” Mark Twain
• “Civilization will thrive when the last stone from the last church falls on the head of the last priest.” Emile Zola
• “Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.” Martin Luther
• “If your wife is cold, call the maid.” Martin Luther in “Table Talk” Read more

Christian chaos vs. Zen silence

The distinguished historian Arnold Toynbee made a fascinating observation before he died. He wrote that when historians of the future look at our period, they are going to find that the single most important historical event was the penetration of Eastern religions into the orthodox Christianity of America.

We might ask, “Is such an infusion taking place?”

Fifty years ago, if you wanted to study a sacred Eastern text, it would have been almost impossible to find one outside of a University library. Today, every small corner bookstore in the country is crammed with all the material anyone could want on Taoism, Zen, Hinduism, Yoga, meditation, mysticism and related subjects.

Tour companies advertise: “Explore the beauty and mystery of Zen. Three weeks in Japan.”

In my classes at the University of Puget Sound, I always asked my students at the end of the semester to name the section that had meant the most to them. Invariably it was the section on Zen and Taoism. Specific courses in Eastern religions were always full to overflowing.

Many scholars and ministers within the Christian tradition are studying with Zen Masters. The noted Theologian, Paul Tillich of the University of Chicago and Harvard, wrote an excellent book presenting the thesis that Christianity is today being judged by the older religious traditions of the East. Many seminars are being held around the country bringing together Buddhists monks, Zen masters, Christian ministers, Jewish rabbis and professors of religion.

Contemporary Quantum Physics is saying that the perceptions of reality found in Eastern thought are far more in harmony with what is known today about the world we live in than are the archaic concepts and cosmologies of the bible.

No other religion in the entire 100,000-year history of religion has become so splintered, fragmented and unidentifiable as the one we call by the name of Christianity. Zen is Zen, period. Taoism is Taoism, period. But what is Christianity? Is it Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormonism, Pentecostal, Unitarian, Jehovah’s Witness, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, television evangelism, mega fundamentalist churches…  and I could continue for pages, taken right out of the yellow pages of your phone book, of the fragmented and splintered religion called Christianity? I call it “Christian chaos.” What is it? Who knows? Read more

Impotent churches

The vast majority of Christian churches, in my many years of experience with them, are in desperate need of a Viagra type pill to stimulate blood flow to the brain.

Three examples, out of one thousand that I could write:

St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, in Palm Desert, very large with tons of money, known as the church that the Nordstrom family built. I asked the Senior Minister this question one day: “Why don’t you invite in Bishop John Shelby Spong to give a series of lectures? He is one of your Senior Episcopal Bishops, and a solid scholar who wrote the best seller, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. The Senior Minister of St. Margaret’s looked at me and said, “My God Bill… if I did that I would lose half of the congregation and probably more than half of our financial contributions.” I promptly wrote my next column in the Desert Sun about the fact that “St. Margaret’s had turned into a golf and martini club for the wealthy and had little or nothing to do with religion or Christianity or education.” One of my prized keepsakes is a personal, hand written note from the senior Nordstrom in the Coachella Valley, saying: “Thank you for your column. It was long overdue. I look forward to lunch with you in the future.”

The minister of the Church of St. Paul in the Desert, (Episcopal), in Palm Springs, called and invited me to give the closing lecture in a Lenten series on “the future of the Christian church.” I accepted gladly. About two weeks later the Chairman of their Board called me and said: “Our Board does not want you to speak. We consider you “outside” the orthodox beliefs of the church.” The Minister of the church called me three times in the days ahead with apologies.

The Hospice group of Sun Valley-Ketchum, Idaho, invited me to give a series of weekend lectures on “Death and Dying in World Religions” to explain how they differed in the various traditions. They rented a large hall in the local Presbyterian church for the lectures. A week later the Chairman of their Board of Ruling Elders called me and said…and this is an exact quote: “You are not going to speak in this church about all of them foreign religions. We don’t want foreign religions in this church… this is a Jesus Christian church.” I could hardly wait to reply. I said to him, “You have a foreign religion in your church every Sunday. Christianity is a foreign religion. The only true American religion is that of the American Indian.” Getting angry, he said to me, “Indians!!! Them savages didn’t have no religion.”

The entire community of Sun Valley and Ketchum was shocked at this sequence of events, as well as the more enlightened members of that church. A large community hall was rented by the Hospice group. My three weekend lectures were presented to a packed, standing-room-only hall.

Churches like these three need, obviously, all the fresh air they can let in to their congregations. The fact is, you do not know what you think until you hear someone who thinks differently. Any church, or Jewish Temple, that cuts itself off from “outside” dialogue becomes smug, ignorant and incapable of defending its own beliefs except by a parrot-like recitation of dogma and creeds. Read more

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