Right now, there are two extremes in Christianity, both of which are a liability to Western civilization. The first consists of those who damn the existence of other groups. They take the Bible literally and reject scientific explanations for the existence of man and nature in the name of “intelligent design.” Such fundamentalist Christian groups invest a lot of time and energy in converting people. But much of what they preach is at odds with the core principles of the Enlightenment. At the other extreme are those who would appease Islam — like the spiritual head of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who holds that the implementation of Shari’a in the UK is inevitable. Those who adhere to a moderate, peaceful, reformed Christianity are not as active as the first group nor as vocal as the second. They should be.
I don’t follow Jesus because I think Christianity is the best religion. I follow Jesus because he leads me into ultimate reality. He teaches me to live in tune with how reality is.
The British philosopher A.J. Ayer, the doyen of logical positivism, was such a relentless atheist that the novelist W. Somerset Maugham in this last days summoned Ayer to reassure him that there was no life after death. In a London hospital in 1988, Ayer’s heart stopped for four minutes. In that time, he later wrote, he saw a red light and became “aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe.” The experience did not change his atheism, but “slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death — which is due fairly soon — will be the end of me, though I continue to hope it will be.”
“Other religions are instructions with a story sprinkled in, Christianity is a story with instructions sprinkled in”
OK, so that’s not necessarily true for entire books of the old testament. But it is true for the gospel. Christ teaches in parables so we can understand the subversive spiritual truths he is trying to get across to us … and God teaches in a story about Christ so we can understand the true nature of God — infinite redemptive love for his children.
Just finished an incredible autobiography by one of my favorite authors, 90 year-old Huston Smith. Professor Smith has led a pretty amazing life: raised in China by missionary parents, he interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt on the radio, invited Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at an all-white university, chatted with Thomas Merton on his last plane ride before his death, and befriended Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and the Dalai Lama. He has experimented with hallucinogenics for spiritual purposes, and was the first to study multiphonic chanting by monks in Tibet. Now he totters around in an assisted living facility, bent over from osteoporosis, and whispers under his breath, “God, you are so good to me” thirty or forty times a day. He says, “It seems I finally have a mantra.”
I was introduced to his book Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions in a religion class as an undergrad. His explanation of how all religions point to the same God is the best I have read anywhere: mystics from different religions sound a lot alike, and the further you get away from the mystics, the greater differences there are between religions. But the point is not for everyone to become a mystic (very few are so inclined or able), or for everyone to practice a new-agey mish-mash of religions. The correct response to this understanding is to worship God within the tradition that speaks to each of us (because that is how most of us are wired) while being respectful of other religions and understanding that God is a bigger concept than religion. I had an intuitive sense for this concept, but this book really put it together for me.
Professor Smith: Thanks for your inspiration, and your books, and your example, and your life
