Subject: There is no devil

mrippie@sierra.net     http://www.the-last-church.org
The World's Most Dangerous Book
                                     For many centuries the Roman
Catholic Church was opposed to translating the Holy Scriptures into the
"vulgar tongue." To this day, you can still get rid of a Bible salesman
by saying, "But we are Catholics and, of course, don=92t read the Bible."=

The Catholic hierarchy included subtle theologians and scholars who knew
very well that such a difficult and diverse collection of ancient
writings, taken as the literal Word of God, would be wildly and
dangerously interpreted if put into the hands of ignorant and uneducated
peasants. Likewise, when a missionary boasted to George Bernard Shaw of
the numerous converts he had made, Shaw asked, " Can these people use
rifles?" "Oh, indeed, yes," said the missionary. "Some of them are very
good shots." Whereupon Shaw scolded him for putting us all in peril in
the day when those converts waged holy war against us  for not following
the Bible in the literal sense they  gave to  it. For the Bible says,
"What a good thing it is when the Lord putteth into the hands of the
righteous invincible might." But today, especially in the United States,
there is a taboo against admitting that there are enormous numbers of
stupid and ignorant people, in the bookish and literal sense of these
words. They may be highly intelligent in the arts of farming,
manufacture, engineering and finance, and even in physics, chemistry or
medicine. But this intelligence does not automatically flow over to the
fields of history, archaeology, linguistics, theology, philosophy and
mythology which are what one needs to know in order to make any sense
out such archaic literature as the books of the Bible.



 This may sound snobbish, for there is an assumption that, in the Bible,
God gave His message in plain words for plain people. Once, when I had
given a radio broadcast in Canada, the announcer took me aside and said,
"Don=92t you think that if there is a truly loving God, He would given us=

a plain and specific guide as to how to live our lives?"



 "On the contrary," I replied, "a truly loving God would not stultify
our minds. He would encourage us to think for ourselves." I tried, then,
to show him that his belief in the divine authority of the Bible rested
on nothing more than his own personal opinion, to which, of course, he
was entitled. This is basic. The authority of the Bible, the church, the
state, or of any spiritual or political leader, is derived from the
individual followers and believers, since it is the believers=92 judgment=

that such leaders and institutions speak with a greater wisdom than
there own. This is, obviously, a paradox, for only the wise can
recognize wisdom. Thus, Catholics criticize Protestants for following
their own opinions in understanding the Bible, as distinct from the
interpretations of the Church, which originally issued and authorized
the Bible. But Catholics seldom realize that the authority of the Church
rests, likewise, on the opinion of its individual members that the
Papacy and the councils of the Church are authoritative. The same is
true of the state, for, as a French statesman said, people get the
government they deserve.


 Why does one come to the opinion that the Bible, literally understood,
is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Usually
because one=92s "elders and betters," or an impressively large group of
ones peers, have this opinion. But this is to go along with the
Bandar-log, or monkey tribe, in Rudyard Kipling=92s Jungle Books , who
periodically get together and shout, "We all say so, so it must be
true!" Having been a grandfather for a number of years, I am not
particularly impressed with patriarchal authority. I am of an age with
my own formerly impressive grandfathers (one of whom was a fervent
fundamentalist, or literal believer in the Bible) and I realize that my
opinions are as fallible as theirs.



 But many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a
passionate need for eternal authority and guidance, pretending not to
trust their own judgment.

Nevertheless, it is their own judgment, willy-nilly, that there exists
some authority greater than their own. The fervent fundamentalist
whether Protestant or Catholic, Jew or Moslem is closed to reason and
even communication for fear of losing the security of childish
dependence. He would suffer extreme emotional heebie jeebies if he
didn=92t have the feeling that there was some external and infallible
guide in which he could trust absolutely and without which his very
identity would dissolve.



 This attitude is not faith. It is pure idolatry. The more deceptive
idols are not images of wood and stone but are constructed of words and
ideas mental images of God. Faith is an openness and trusting attitude
to truth and reality, whatever it may turn out to be. This is a risky
and adventurous state of mind. Belief, in the religious sense, is the
opposite of faith because it is a fervent wishing or hope, a compulsive
clinging to the idea that the universe is arranged and governed in such
and such a way. Belief is holding to a rock; faith is learning how to
swim and this whole universe swims in boundless space.



 Thus, in much of the English-speaking world, the King James Bible is a
rigid idol, all the more deceptive for being translated into the most
melodious English and for being an anthology of ancient literature that
contains sublime wisdom along with barbaric histories and the war songs
of tribes on the rampage. All this is taken as the literal Word and
counsel of God, as it is by fundamentalist Baptists, Jesus freaks,
Jehovah=92s Witnesses and comparable sects, which by and large know
nothing of the history of the Bible, of how it was edited and put
together. So we have with us the social menace of a huge population of
intellectually and morally irresponsible people. Take a ruler and
measure the listings under "Churches" in the Yellow Pages of the phone
directory. You will find that the fundamentalists have by far the most
space. And under what pressure do most hotels and motels place Gideon
Bibles by the bedside Bibles with clearly fundamentalist introductory
material, taking their name Gideon from one of the more ferocious
military leaders of the ancient Israelites?



 As is well known, the enormous political power of fundamentalists is
what makes legislators afraid to take laws against victimless "sins" and
crimes off the books, and what corrupts the police by forcing them to be
armed preachers enforcing ecclesiastical laws in a country where church
and state are supposed to be separate ignoring the basic Christian
doctrine that no actions, or abstentions from actions, are of moral
import unless undertaken voluntarily. Freedom is risky and includes the
risk that anyone may go to hell in his own way.



 Now, the King James Bible did not, as one might gather from listening
to fundamentalists, descend with an Angel from heaven AD 1611, when it
was first published. It was an elegant, but often inaccurate,
translation of Hebrew and Greek documents composed between 900 BC and AD
120. There is no manuscript of the Old Testament, that is, of the Hebrew
Scriptures, written in Hebrew, earlier than the Ninth Century BC But we
know that these documents were first put together and recognized as the
Holy Scriptures by a convention of rabbis held at Jamnia (Yavne) in
Palestine shortly before AD 100. On their  say-so. Likewise, the
composition of the Christian Bible, which documents to include and which
to drop, was decided by a council of the Catholic Church held in
Carthage in the latter part of the Fourth Century. Several books that
had formerly been read in the churches, such as the Shepherd of Hermas
and the marvelous Gospel of Saint Thomas , were then excluded. The point
is that the books translated in the King James Bible were declared
canonical and divinely inspired by the authority (A) of the Synod of
Jamnia and (B) of the Catholic Church, meeting in Carthage more than 300
years after the time of Jesus. It is thus that fundamentalist
Protestants get the authority of their Bible from Jews who had rejected
Jesus and from Catholics whom they abominate as the Scarlet Woman
mentioned in Revelation.


 The Bible, to repeat, is an anthology of Hebrew and late Greek
literature, edited and put forth by a council of Catholic bishops who
believed that they were acting under the direction of the Holy Spirit.
Before this time the Bible as we know it did not exist. There were the
Hebrew Scriptures and their translated into Greek the Septuagint,  which
was made in Alexandria between 250 BC and 100 BC There were also various
codices, or Greek manuscripts, of various parts of the New Testament,
such as the four Gospels. There were numerous other writings circulating
among Christians, including the Epistles of Saint Paul and Saint John,
the Apocalypse (Revelation)  and such documents (later excluded) as the
Acts of John , the Didache , the Apostolic Constitutions  and the
various Epistles of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp.



 In those days, and until the Protestant Reformation in the 16th
Century, the Scriptures were not understood exclusively in a narrow
literal sense. From Clement of Alexandria (Second Century) to Saint
Thomas Aquinas (13th Century), the great theologians, or Fathers of the
Church, recognized four ways of interpreting the Scriptures: the literal
or historical, the moral, the allegorical and the spiritual and they
were overwhelmingly interested in the last three. Origen (Second
Century) regarded much of the Old Testament as "puerile" if taken
literally, and Jewish theologians were likewise preoccupied with finding
hidden meanings in the Scriptures, for the concern of all these
theologians was to interpret the Biblical texts in such a way as to make
the Bible intellectually respectable

 and philosophically interesting. Concern over the historical truth of
the Bible is relatively modern, whether in the form of fundamentalism or
of scientific research.


 But when the Bible was translated and widely distributed as a result of
the invention of printing, it fell into the hands of people who, like
the Jesus freaks of today, were simply uneducated and who, as the
depressed classes of Europe, eventually swarmed over to America. This
is, naturally, a heroic generalization. There were, and are,
fundamentalists learned in languages and sciences (although the standard
translation of the Bible into Chinese is said to be in fearful taste),
just as there are professors of physics and anthropology who somehow
manage to be pious Mormons. Some people have the peculiar ability to
divide their minds into watertight compartments, being critical and
rational in matters of science but credulous as children when it comes
to religion.



 Such superstition would have been relatively harmless if the religion
had been something tolerant and pacific, such as Taoism or Buddhism. But
the religion of the literally understood Bible is chauvinistic and
militant. It is on the march to conquer the world and to establish
itself as the one and only true belief. Among its most popular hymns are
such battle songs as "Mine eyes have seen the glory" and Onward,
Christian Soldiers.  The God of the Hebrews, the Arabs and the
Christians is a mental idol fashioned in the image of the great monarchs
of Egypt, Chaldea and Persia. It was possibly Ikhnaton (Amenhotep IV,
14th Century BC), Pharaoh of Egypt, who gave Moses the idea of
monotheism (as suggested in Freud=92s Moses and Monotheism). Certainly th=
e
veneration of God as "King of kings and Lord of lords" borrows the
official title of the Persian emperors. Thus, the political pattern of
tyranny, beneficent or otherwise, of rule by violence, whether physical
or moral, stands firmly behind the Biblical idea of Jehovah.



 When one considers the architecture and ritual of churches, whether
Catholic or Protestant, it is obvious until most recent times that they
are based on royal or judicial courts. A monarch who rules by force sits
in the central court of his donjon with his back to the wall, flanked by
guards, and those who come to petition him for justice or to offer
tribute must kneel or prostrate themselves simply because these are
difficult positions from which to start a fight. Such monarchs are, of
course, frightened of their subjects and constantly on the anxious alert
for rebellion. Is this an appropriate image for the inconceivable energy
that underlies the universe? True, the altar-throne in Catholic churches
is occupied by the image of God in the form of  one crucified as a
common thief, but he hangs there as our leader in subjection to the
Almighty Father, King of the universe, propitiating Him for those who
have broken His not always reasonable laws. And what of the curious
resemblance between Protestant churches and courts of law? The minister
and the judge wear the same black robe and "throw the book" at those
assembled in pews and various kinds of boxes, and both ministers and
judges have chairs of estate that are still, in effect, thrones.



 The crucial question, then, is that if you picture the universe as a
monarchy, how can you believe that a republic is the best form of
government, and so be a loyal citizen of the United States? It is thus
that fundamentalists veer to the extreme right wing in politics, being
of the personality type that demands strong external and paternalistic
authority. Their "rugged individualism" and their racism are founded on
the conviction that they are the elect of God the Father, and their
forebears took possession of America as the armies of Joshua took
possession of Canaan, treating the Indians as Joshua and Gideon treated
the Bedouin of Palestine. In the same spirit the Protestant British,
Dutch and Germans took possession of Africa, India and Indonesia, and
the rigid Catholics of Spain and Portugal colonized Latin America. Such
territorial expansion may or may not be practical politics, but to do it
in the name of Jesus of Nazareth is an outrage.

<p>

 The Bible is a dangerous book, though by no means an evil one. It
depends, largely, on how you read it with what prejudices and with what
intellectual background. Regarded as sacred and authoritative, such a
complex collection of histories, legends, allegories and images becomes
a monstrous Rorschach blot in which you can picture almost anything you
want to discover just as one can see cities and mountains in the clouds
or faces in the fire. Fundamentalists "prove" the truth of the Bible by
trying to show how the words of the prophets have foretold events that
have come to pass in relatively recent times. But any statistician knows
that you can find correlation=92s, if you want to, between almost any two=

sets of patterns or rhythms between the occurrence of sunspots and
fluctuations of the stock market, between the lines and bumps on your
hand and the course of your life or between the architecture of the
Great Pyramid and the history of Europe. This is because of eidetic
vision, or the brain=92s ability to project visions and forms of its own
into any material whatsoever. But scholars of ancient history find the
remarks of the prophets entirely relevant to events of their own time,
in the ancient Near East. The Biblical prophets were not so much
predictors as social commentators.



 I am not in the position of those liberal Christians who reject
fundamentalism but must still insist that Jesus was the one and only
incarnation of God, or at least the most perfect human being. No one is
intellectually free who feels that he cannot and must not disagree with
Jesus and is therefore forced into the dishonest practice of wangling
the words of the Gospels to fit his own opinions.

There is not a scrap of evidence that Jesus was familiar with any other
religious tradition than that of the Hebrew Scriptures or that he knew
anything of the civilizations of India, China or Peru.

Under these circumstances, he was faced with the virtually impossible
problem of expressing himself in the peculiar religious language and
imagery of his local culture. For it is obvious to any student of the
psychology of religion that what he needed to express was the relatively
common change of consciousness known as mystical experience the vivid
and overwhelming sensation that your own being is one with eternal and
ultimate reality. But it was as hard for Jesus to say this as it still
is for a native of the American Bible Belt. It implies the blasphemous,
subversive and lunatic claim to be identical with the all-knowing and
allruling monarch of the world its Pharaoh or Cyrus. Jesus would have
had no trouble in India, for this experience is the foundation of
Hinduism, and the Hindus recognize many people in both ancient and
modern times as embodiments of the divine, or sons of God but not, of
course, of the kind of God represented by Jehovah. Buddhists, likewise,
teach that anyone can, and finally will, become a Buddha (an Enlightened
One), in the same way as the historic Gautama.



 If the Gospel of Saint John , in particular, is to be believed, Jesus
emphatically identified himself with the Godhead, considering such
phrases as "I and the Father are one," or "He who has seen me has seen
the Father," or "Before Abraham was, I am," or "I am the way, the truth
and the life." But this was not an exclusive claim for himself as the
man Jesus, for at John  10:31, just after he has said "I and the Father
are one," the crowd picks up rocks to stone him to death.
      He protests:

"Many good works have I shown you from my Father; for which of

those works do you stone me?" The Jews answered him, saying, "We do not
stone you for a

good work, but for blasphemy, and because you, being a man, make
yourself God."</blockquote>

And here it comes:
Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your law, I said, you are
gods [quoting Psalms

82]? If He [i.e., God] called those to whom He gave His word gods and
you can=92t contradict

the Scriptures how can you say of Him whom the Father has sanctified and
sent into the

world, =91You blaspheme!=92 because I said, =91I am a son of God" [The
original Greek says "a son,"

not "the son."]</>

   In other words, the Gospel, or "good news" that Jesus was trying to
convey, despite the limitations of his tradition, was that we are all
sons of God. When he uses the terms I am (as in "Before Abraham was, I
am") or Me (as in "No one comes to the Father but by Me"), he is
intending to use them in the same way as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita :
He who sees Me everywhere and sees all in Me; I am not lost to him, nor
is he lost to Me. The yogi who, established in oneness, worships Me
abiding in all beings, lives in Me, whatever be his outward life.

  And by this "Me" Krishna means the atman that is at once the basic
self in us and in the universe. To know this is to enjoy eternal life,
to discover that the fundamental "I am" feeling, which you confuse with
your superficial ego, is the ultimate reality forever and ever, amen.

   In this essential respect, the, the Gospel has been obscured and
muffled almost from the beginnings. For Jesus was presumably trying to
say that our consciousness is the divine spirit, "the light which
enlightens every one who comes into the world," and which George Fox,
founder of the Quakers, called the Inward Light. But the Church, still
bound to the image of God as the King of kings, couldn=92t accept this
Gospel. It adopted a religion about  Jesus instead of the religion of
Jesus. It kicked him upstairs and put him in the privileged and unique
position of being the Boss=92s son, so that, having this unique advantage=
,
his life and example became useless to everyone else. The individual
Christian must not know that his own "I am" is the one that existed
before Abraham. In this way, the Church institutionalized and made a
virtue of feeling chronic guilt for not being as good as Jesus. It only
widened the alienation, the colossal difference, that monotheism put
between man and God.

      When I try to explain this to Jesus freaks and other Bible
bangers, they invariably reveal theological ignorance by saying, "But
doesn=92t the Bible say that Jesus was the only -begotten son of God?" It=

doesn=92t. Not, at least, according to Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and
Anglican interpretations. The phrase "only-begotten son refers not to
Jesus the man but to the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, who
is said to have become incarnate in the man Jesus. Nowhere does the
Bible, or even the creeds of the Church, say that Jesus was the only
incarnation of God the Son in all time and space. Furthermore, it is not
generally known that God the Son is symbolized as both male and female,
as Logos-Sophia, the Design and the Wisdom of God, based on the passage
in Proverbs
7:9, where the Wisdom of God speaks as a woman.

  "But then," they go on to argue, "doesn=92t the Bible say that there is=

no other name under heaven whereby men may be saved except the name of
Jesus? But what is the name  of Jesus? J-E-S-U-S? Iesous? Aissa?
Jehoshua? Or however else it may be pronounced? It is said that every
prayer said in name of Jesus will be granted, and obviously this doesn=92=
t
mean that "Jesus" is a signature on a blank check. It means that prayers
will be granted when made in the spirit of Jesus, and that spirit is,
again, the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal God the Son, who
could just as well have been incarnate in Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tzu or
Ramana Maharshi as in Jesus of Nazareth.



 It is amazing what both the Bible and the Church are presumed to teach
but don=92t teach. Listening to fundamentalists, one would suppose that i=
f
there are living beings on other planets in this or other galaxies. they
must wait for salvation until missionaries from earth arrive on
spaceships, bringing the Bible and baptism. But if "God so loves the
world" and means it, He will surely send His son to wherever he is
needed, and there is no difference in principle between a planet
circling Alpha Centauri and peoples as remote from Palestine AD 30 as
the Chinese or the Incas.

It should be understood that the expression "son of" means "of the
nature of," as when we call someone a son of a bitch and as when the
Bible uses such phrases as "sons of Belial" (an alien god), or an Arab
cusses someone out as e-ben-i-el-homa  "son of donkey!" or simply
"stupid". Used in this way,"son of" has nothing to do with maleness or
being younger than. Likewise, the Second Person of the Trinity, God the
Son, the Logos-Sopia, refers to the basic pattern or design of the
Universe, ever emerging from the inconceivable mystery or the Father as
the galaxies shine out of space. This is how the great philosophers of
the Church have thought about the imagery of the Bible and as it appears
to a modern student of the history and psychology of world religions.
Call it intellectual snobbery if you will, but although the books of the
Bible might have been "plain words for plain people" in the days of
Isaiah and Jesus, an uneducated and uninformed person who reads them
today, and takes them as the literal Word of God, will become a blind
and confused bigot.

   Let us look at this against the background of the fact that all
monotheistic religions have been militant. Wherever God has been
idolized as the King or Boss-Principle of the world, believers are agog
to impose both their religion and their political rulership upon others.
Fanatical believers in the Bible, the Koran and the Torah have fought
one another for centuries without realizing that they belong to the same
pestiferous club, that they have more in common than they have against
one another and that there is simply no way of deciding which of their
"unique" revelations of God=92s will is the true one. A committed believe=
r
in the Koran trots out the same arguments for his point of view as a
Southern Baptist devotee of the Bible, and neither can listen to reason,
because their whole sense of personal security and integrity depends
absolutely upon pretending to follow an external authority. The very
existence of this authority, as well as the sense of identity of its
follower and true believer, requires an excluded class of infidels,
heathens and sinners people whom you can punish and bully so as to know
that you are strong and alive. No argument, no reasoning, no contrary
evidence can possibly reach the true believer, who, if he is somewhat
sophisticated, justifies and even glorifies his invincible stupidity as
a "leap of faith" or "sacrifice of the intellect." He quotes the Roman
lawyer and theologian Tertullian Credo, quia absurdum est , "I believe
because it is absurd" as if Tertullian had said something profound. Such
people are, quite literally, idiots originally a Greek word meaning an
individual so isolated that you can=92t communicate with him.

      Oddly enough, there are unbelievers who envy them, who wish that
they could have the serenity and peace of mind that come from "knowing"
beyond doubt that you have the true Word of God and are in the right.
But this overlooks the fact that those who supposedly have this peace
within themselves are outwardly obstreperous and violent, standing in
dire need of converts and followers to convince themselves of their
continuing validity just as much as they need outsiders to punish.

       Mindless belief in the literal truth of the Bible and furious
zeal to spread the message lead to such widespread follies, in the
American Bible Belt, as playing with poisonous snakes and drinking
strychnine to prove the truth of Mark 16:18, where Jesus is reported to
have said: "They [the faithful] shall take up serpents: and if they
drink any deadly, thing, it shall not hurt them." As recently as April
1973, two men (one a pastor) in Newport, Tennessee, died in convulsions
from taking large amounts of strychnine before a congregation shouting,
"Praise God! Praise God!" So they didn't have enough faith; but such
barbarous congregations will go on trying these experiments again and
again to test and prove their faith, not realizing that by Christian
standards this is arrant spiritual pride. Meanwhile, the Government
persecutes religious groups that use such relatively harmless herbs as
peyote and marijuana for sacraments.

      What is to be done about the existence of millions of such
dangerous people in the world? Obviously, they must not be censored or
suppressed by their own methods. Even though it is impossible to
persuade or argue with them in a reasonable way, it is just possible
that they can be wooed and enchanted by a more attractive style of
religion, which will show them that their unbending "faith" in their
Bibles is simply an inverse expression of doubt and terror a frantic
whistling in the dark.

        There have been other images of God than the Father-Monarch: the
Cosmic Mother; the inmost Self (disguised as all living beings), as in
Hinduism; the indefinable Tao, the flowing energy of the universe, as
among the Chinese; or no image at all, as with the Buddhists, who are
not strictly atheists but who feel that the ultimate reality cannot be
pictured in any way and, what is more, that not picturing it is a
positive way of feeling it directly, beyond symbols and images. I have
called this "atheism in the name of God" a paradoxical and catchy phrase
pointing out something missed by learned Protestant theologians who have
been talking about "death of God" theology and "religionless
Christianity," and asking what of the Gospel of Christ can be saved if
life is nothing more than a trip from the maternity ward to the
crematorium. It is weird how such sophisticated Biblical scholars must
go on clinging to Jesus even when rejecting the basic principle of his
teaching the experience that he was God in the flesh, an experience he
unknowingly shared with all the great mystics of the world.

   Atheism in the name of God is an abandonment of all religious
beliefs, including atheism, which in practice is the stubbornly held
idea that the world is a mindless mechanism. Atheism in the name of God
is giving up the attempt to make sense of the world in terms of any
fixed idea or intellectual system. It is becoming again as a child and
laying oneself open to reality as it is actually and directly felt,
experiencing it without trying to categorize, identify or name it.

This can be most easily begun by listening to the world with closed
eyes, in the same way that one can listen to music without asking what
it says or means. This is actually a turn-on a state of consciousness in
which the past and future vanish (because they cannot be heard) and in
which there is no audible difference yourself and what you are hearing.
There is simply universe, an always present happening in which there is
no perceptible difference between self and other, or, as in breathing,
between what you do and what happens to you. Without losing command of
civilized behavior, you have temporarily "regressed" to what Freud
called the oceanic feeling of the baby the feeling that we all lost in
learning to make distinctions, but that we should have retained as their
necessary background, just as there must be empty white paper under this
print if you are to read it.

    When you listen to the world in this way, you have begun to practice
what Hindus and Buddhists call meditation a re-entry to the real world,
as distinct from the abstract world of words and ideas. If you find that
you can't stop naming the various sounds and thinking in words, just
listen to yourself doing that as another form of noise, a meaningless
murmur like the sound of traffic. I won't argue for this experiment.
Just try it and see what happens, because this is the basic act of faith
of being unreservedly open and vulnerable to what is true and real.

   Certainly this is what Jesus himself must have had in mind in that
famous passage in the Sermon on the Mount upon which one will seldom
hear anything from a pulpit: "Which of you by thinking can add a measure
to his height? And why are you anxious about clothes?

Look at the flowers of the field, how they grow. They neither labor nor
spin; and yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his splendor was not
arrayed like any one of them. So if God so clothes the wild grass which
lives for today and tomorrow is burned, shall He not much more clothe
you, faithless ones? . . . Don't be anxious for the future, for the
future will take care of itself. Sufficient to the day are its
troubles." Even the most devout Christians can=92t take this. They feel
that such advice was all very well for Jesus, being the Boss's son, but
this is no wisdom for us practical and lesser-born mortals.

You can, of course, take these words in their allegorical and spiritual
sense, which is that you stop clinging in terror to a rigid system of
ideas about what will happen to you after you die, or as to what,
exactly, are the procedures of the court of heaven, whereby the world is
supposedly governed. Curiously, both science and mysticism (which might
be called religion as experienced rather than religion as written) are
based on the experimental attitude of looking directly at what is, of
attending to life itself instead of trying to glean it from a book.

The scholastic theologians would not look through Galileo=92s telescope,
and Billy Graham will not experiment with a psychedelic chemical or
practice yoga.

Two eminent historians of science, Joseph Needham and Lynn White, have
pointed out the surprising fact that in both Europe and Asia, science
arises from mysticism, because both the mystic and the scientist are
types of people who want to know directly, for themselves, rather than
be told what to believe. And in this sense they follow the advice of
Jesus to become again "as little children," to look at the world with
open, clear, and unprejudiced eyes, as if they had never seen it before.
It is in this spirit that an astronomer must look at the sky and a yogi
must attend to the immediately present moment, as when he concentrates
on a prolonged sound. Years and years of book study may simply fossilize
you into fixed habits of thought so that any perceptive person will know
in advance how you will react to any situation or idea. Imagining
yourself reliable, you become merely predictable and, alas, boring. Most
sermons are tedious. One knows in advance what the preacher is going to
say, however dressed up on a fancy language. Going strictly by the book,
he will have no original ideas or experiences, for which reason both he
and his followers become rigid and easily shocked personalities who
cannot swing, wiggle, lilt or dance.
      In this connection it should be noted that the blacks of the South
swing and wiggle quite admirably, even in church but this is because the
preacher, starting from the Bible in deference to his white overlords,
very soon reverts to the rhythms and incantations of some old-time
African religion, and there is no knowing at all what he  is going to
say. This is perhaps one of the principle roots of conflict between
whites and blacks in the American South that the former go by the Book
and the latter by the spirit, which, like the wind, as Jesus put it,
blows where it wills, and you can=92t tell where it comes from or where
it=92s going.

     Thus, we reach the seeming paradox that you cannot at once idolize
the Bible and embody the spirit of Jesus. He twitted the Pharisees as
today he would twit the fundamentalists: "You search the Scriptures
daily, for in them you think  you have life." The religion of  Jesus was
to trust life, both as he felt it in himself and as he saw it around
him. Most of us would feel that this was a ridiculous gamble to the Jews
a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness but, come to think of
it, is there any  real alternative? Basically, no human community can
exist that is not founded on mutual trust as distinct from law and its
enforcement. The alternative to mutual trust, which is indeed a risky
gamble, is the security of the police state, and we can=92t have that.

SEE http://www.the-last-church.org
mrippie@sierra.net










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