FREEING GOD FROM RELIGION
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
#1 Freeing God From Religion "If I am not for myself, who is? And if not now, when? (Hillel) "Either you repeat the conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true and it will sound like it's from Neptune" (Noam Chomsky) "I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. ... If you are true, but not in the same truth with me; cleave to your companions, I will seek my own" (R.W.Emerson) "I needed to finish; I had never finished anything. To be exact, to condense myself to a pinpoint, impaling a fact, a certainty". (Margaret Atwood) Dream freely. Envision excellence. Cherish your creations. Exude enthusiasm. Be inspired. Inspire others. Take pride in you. Recognize inner beauty. Draw on inner strength. Look inside your soul. Create peace. Seek truth. Spread joy. Embark on adventure. Launch new ideas. Think big. Invoke possibilities. Live fully. Reach out. Aim high. Find happiness. Expect the best. Be the best. Believe in yourself. -Jan Michelson: ********************* The title reads, Freeing God From religion. The thought that God is fenced-in is obnoxiously opprobrious in the extreme. Imagine! God in a fence that has no gate. The creeds, or Articles of Faith found in hymn books, are precisely such fences. Even the Bible can be turned into a fence without gates. Yes, I know C.S.Lewis is heralded as one, who with agony and ecstasy tried to free God. His ward robe had a door - a door way he never did go through. God has never written any part of the Bible or any theology supposedly rising from it. But as of now God is all fenced up in the Bible, the Koran or some other so-called holy book, and above all, the creeds. "Cliff, come to our liturgical church service. We recite the creeds". Silently I groan, "My God!" As of now God is unable to escape what we say the Bible says about him. Now if God did not write holy words or a theology, then humans did. But after they did, they sat around and decided it would be in their best interests to say that God, in a mysterious way, dictated the theology to them in the first place. Those oral traditions gave rise to writings which were then turned into a theology from which the Bible came. The process reeked of cozenage and mischievous pretension. Let me be clear; theology was precedent to the Bible. Theology does not come from the Bible; it made the Bible. Bright moonlight filled the cool November sky as Jeanette and I walked from the barn to our house on our farm near Abbotsford, British Columbia,. In the south-west, just above the tall cedars next to the ravine, we saw an unusually bright, reddish glowing star, and as we gazed at it, Jeanette remarked, "Wow! Is that ever pretty! What planet is that? "It is probably the planet Mars. I hear that the orbit of Mars is very close to Earth right now. That's why they call it the evening star". Captured by the wonder of the moment, she continued, "So tell me Cliff, what our life all about is anyway? Why are we even seeing this and asking questions about a star?" Bothered by just such issues I responded with the question I still have trouble articulating, "Yeah, Jeanette, and just what kind of God have we got hold of who would set up for humans on this itsy-bitsy, water-covered planet Earth, a complex morality plot, where to believe something supposedly results in good stuff and where to not believe carries outrageous penalties for inconsequential bits of human protoplasm who never even asked to be born?" "We have fenced in God by our words about him. God has never told anyone anything about himself; it has always been humans (mostly men) who have told Him about Himself. All religion is of human origin, imagination and fantasy. God is NOT the originator of the theology in which we have fenced him. God did not write the Bible; He did not write the Koran, the Talmud, the Vestas. He has never spoken in an audible voice; it was humans who told God who he was and what he was saying - not dissimilar to the executive who growls at his under study, "If I want your opinion, I'll give it to you".
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
If you tend to shake your head when you read religious literature, please read this book. I invite being disagreed with; I welcome debate and do not object to being told I am wrong. The question remains: Who has the right religion? Despite being an octogenarian when presumably all should be settled and nailed down, I now challenge the theology I nodded to so vigorously in a previous time of my life. What I once assumed as truth is now open to the kind of tough scrutiny I had never dared engage in. My theological life scripts were deeply rooted and beyond challenge. Born and raised in a fundamentalist Mennonite conservative evangelical community, doubting and questioning were considered acts of sin. Even though we were good ethical people, we were repaganized every year by visiting English speaking evangelists and getting saved was an annual event. I know; I did it three times before I was fifteen. I include a simple caveat. Once you start critiquing and investigating your beliefs, even the most cherished, you will find that you cannot go back. The very act of questioning intensifies the importance of the question. Millions of books exist about God; every book written by a human being (mostly men). Over twenty five miles of shelves with books about God are in the archives under the Vatican. I had fifteen shelves with many books that talk about God.
About the Author
On February 23, 1929, I was born as the twelfth child in the home of John Andrew Ratzlaff/Thiessen and Elizabeth Schmidt/Unruh. Our home was situated six miles north west of Waldheim, Saskatchewan; a Mennonite village that was named after a village in Southern Russia from where my great-grandparents emigrated in the late 19th century. After the usual completion of elementary and secondary school and after earning a B.A. degree in Psychology from the University of Saskatchewan, I began independent life as a school teacher in Saskatchewan as well as 10 years of teaching in Zimbabwe, Africa. During furloughs and after disconnecting from the NGO (TEAM) that sponsored us, I completed requirements for another undergraduate degree, a B.Ed., in Educational Psychology, also from the university of Saskatchewan, an M.Sc., from Kansas State Teachers College, Emporia and a Ph.D. from Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A. Just before my last year in B.A. studies, on Sept 12, 1953, I married Jeanette Violet Anderson, who already had earned a B.A. in medical technology, and who graciously allowed me to carry on studies while she earned food and rent money as a laboratory technologist in Saskatoon City Hospital. After graduate studies I worked for 2 and ½ years as an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon campus, and then worked for the federal government as chief psychologist in a mental hospital associated with federal Corrections in Abbotsford, B.C. Then followed thirty five years of work in our own psychological services clinic situated in Abbotsford, B.C. Canada.