Relationship With God

The Restoration of Religion

So many people presume to know God and what God approves and disapproves that it is impossible to take up this subject without opening oneself to attack as sacrilegious seems to be nearer to a great thought then to a great machine.  So we are left with the unforgettable and yet, strangely satisfied feeling that what religion is left in our lives will be a very much more simplified feeling of reverence for the beauty and grandeur and mystery of life, with its responsibilities, but will be deprived of the good old, glad certainties and assertion with theology has accumulated and laid over its surface.

When we die, the work we leave behind us continues to influence others and play a part, however small in the life of community in which we live.  In this very real sense, we may say that Louis Pasteur, Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison are still living among us. What if their bodies are dead, since “body” is nothing but an abstract generalization for a constantly changing combination of chemical constituents.

Religion is a way of an individual, personal thing.  Every person must workout his own views of religion and if he is sincere, God will not blame him, however he turns out.  Every man’s religious experience is valid for himself.

I believe, no one can be natural and happy unless he is intellectually sincere with himself, and to be natural is to be in heaven.

Pagan 

Pagan means one who is not a believer.  He is one who starts out with its earthly life as well we can or need to bother about wishes to live intently and happily as long as his life tests, often has a sense of the poignant sadness of his life and faces it cheerily, has a keen appreciation of the beautiful and the good in human life wherever he finds them, and regards doing good as its own satisfactory reward.

The difference in spiritual life between a believer and a Pagan is simply this; the believer lives in a world governed and watched over by God, to whom he has a constant personal relationship and therefore in a world presided over by a kindly father, his conduct is also often uplifted to a level consonant with his consciousness of being a child of God; no doubt a level which is difficult for a human mortal to maintain consistently at all periods of life or of the week or even of the day; his actual life varies between living on human and the truly religious levels.  On the other hand, the pagan lives in the world like an orphan, without the benefit of that consoling feeling that there is always someone in heaven who cares and who will, when the spiritual relationship called prayer is established, attend to his private personal welfare.  It is no doubt a less cheery world; but there is the benefit and dignity of being an orphan who by necessity has learned to be independent, to take care of himself, and to be more mature, as all orphans are.

The suspicion that anything which is coloured or not solidly true is fatal.  There is a price one must be willing to pay for the truth, whatever the consequences, let us have it.  The position is comparable to any psychologically the same as that of a murderer.  If one has committed a murder, the best thing he can do is to confess it.  That is why I say it takes a little courage to become a pagan.  But, one has accepted the worst, one is also without fear.  Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.

The Christian will not be humble.  He will not be satisfied with the aggregate immortality of his great stream of life of which he is already a part, flowing on to eternity, like a mighty stream which empties into the great sea and changes and yet does not change the clay vessel will ask of the potter, “Why hast thou cast me into this shape and why hast thou made me so brittle?” The clay vessel is not satisfied that it can leave little vessels of its own kind when it cracks up.  Man is not satisfied that he has received this marvelous body, divine body.  He wants to live forever.

Thinking was always dangerous.  More than that, thinking was always allied with the devil. Christian theologians are the greatest enemies of Christian religion.  I could never get over two great contradictions.  The first that the entire structure of the Christian belief hang upon the existence of an apple of Adam had not eaten an apple, there would be no original sin and if there was no original sin, there would be no need for redemption. This is unfair to the teachings of Christ, who never said a word about the original sin or the redemption.  I feel if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to hell.  This is the final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.

Still more preposterous another preposition seemed to me that, when Adam and Eve ate an apple during their honeymoon, God was so angry that he condemned their posterity to suffer from generation to generation for that little offence but that, when the same posterity murdered the same God’s only Son, God was so delighted that he forgave them all.  No matter how people explain and argues I cannot get over this simple untruth.

When I reasoned with my colleague, “If there were no God, people would not do good and the world would go topsy-turvy”, “Why, replied my colleague “We should lead a decent human life simply because we are decent human beings”, he said.

The world of pagan belief is a simpler belief.  It postulates nothing and is obliged to postulate nothing.  It seems to make the good life more immediately appealing by appealing to the good life alone.  It better justifies doing good by making it unnecessary for doing good to justify itself.  It does not encourage men to do, for instance, a simple act of charity by dragging in a series of hypothetical postulates sin, redemption the cross laying up treasure in heaven, mutual obligation among men on account of a third party relationship in heaven – all so unnecessarily complicated and roundabout, and none capable of direct proof.  If one accepts the statement that doing good is its own justification, one cannot help regarding all theological baits to right living as redundant and tending to cloud the luster of a moral truth.  Love among men should be a final, absolute fact.  We should be able just to look at each other and love each other without being reminded of a third party in heaven.

Revelation 

The revelation of special mystery or divine scheme given to a prophet and kept by an apostolic succession, which was found necessary in all religions to handle exclusively a special, patented monopoly of salvation.  All priest crafts lives on the common staple food of revelation.  The simple truths of Christ teaching on the mount must be adorned and hence we have the “first Adam” and the “second Adam” and so on and so forth.

It is wrong therefore, to speak of a pagan as an irreligious man, irreligious he is only as one who refuses to believe in any special variety of revelation.  A pagan always believes in God but would not like to say so, for fear of being misunderstood.  All pagans believe in God.  He is honest enough to leave the creator of things in a halo of mystery, towards whom he feels a kind of awed piety and reverence of the beauty of this universe, the clever artist try of the myriad things of this creation, the mystery of the stars, the grandeur of heaven and the dignity of human soul he is equally aware.  But that again suffices for him.  He accepts death as he accepts pain and suffering and weighs them against the gift of life and the fresh country breeze and the clear mountain moon and he does not complain.  If the creator of things wants him to die, he gladly dies.  He also believes that “heaven’s way always goes round” and that there is no permanent injustice in this world.  He does not ask for more.