(This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the interaction of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience our natural impulse toward the Divine, which does not make others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)
Friday is Book Day on the blog, when we take a look at books – old and new — that I highly recommend you not miss. This week’s recommended reading: The ASSAULT ON REASON, by Al Gore
HIGHLIGHTS OF TODAY’S BLOG…
* Al Gore hits the bull’s eye again
* What has happened to our country?
* Have we lost our voice? Do we even want one?
* Christians shout down Hindu prayer in U.S. Senate chamber
The former vice president of the United States has done it again, and he is rapidly becoming the America’s Waker-Upper in Chief, even if he couldn’t become America’s president.
First there was Al Gore’s extraordinary traveling slide show on global warming. Then there came the movie made from that show, an Academy award-winning film titled An Inconvenient Truth. Then there was a New York Times best-selling book of the same title. And last weekend there was the spectacular 24-hour rolling global concert which Mr. Gore organized to raise consciousness around the world regarding the environment and to put pressure on governments everywhere to do something about the ecological crisis that Mr. Gore has been telling us we now face.
Now, as if that weren’t enough, his newest book, The Assault on Reason, is also topping the bestseller charts — and with good reason…
It is an extraordinary document that I can only wish that everyone in the United States would read. That’s not going to happen, of course but what could happen is that many hundreds of thousands of people will read it — if you decide to tell everyone who you know about it.
In his newest writing the former vice president asks a compelling question: “Why do reason, logic and truth seemed to play a diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?”
Says Mr. Gore, “A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: ‘What has happened to our country?’ People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.”
Discussing some of the choices and policies of the current national administration — policies which many Americans believe are producing significant risk for this country and have caused us to abandon our values — the author says: “It is too easy — and to partisan — to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us?”
Mr. Gore says that one of the majors threats to American democracy is the fact that so many in the United States are reading so much less. ” Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention…”
And, he says television leads the pack. Americans now watch TV 4 hours and 35 minutes every day on the average. “When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all discretionary time the average American has,” Mr. Gore notes.
In such an environment, most people receive information about life as humanity is experiencing it collectively, but they cannot send information. They hear, but they do not speak, as Mr. Gore would say. The result is that we have lost our voice. Worse yet, many of us have lost our desire to even have a voice.
And, within the political arena, we don’t look for candidates who speak to us in statements of substance. Rather, we make assessments of the image that they project, we examine how they feel to us, we seem more interested in how they look than how they think is.
The book is much deeper than that, however. It lays out a striking case for the “assault on reason” of Mr. Gore’s title. This text is important reading — no, it is vital reading — for all people who truly want to make a difference in our world today and who are becoming increasingly frustrated with their ability to enter into reasoned dialogue with their peers on any number of matters, not least of which might be the need to alter our entire belief system and the opportunity that presents itself for humanity to do so through the embracing of the New Spirituality.
Run, don’t walk, to your nearest bookstore. Or jump on the Internet and find a bookseller’s website. Do whatever you have to do to get this book into your hands as soon as you can. It does a great deal more than simply discuss the “down side” of our current situation. It talks about the opportunities to revitalize the role played by the people in the governing of America and in the creation of a new and different tomorrow.
There are those who wish that Al Gore would run again for President. But Mr. Gore has said he has lost his taste for politics, and I, for one, see that he is having — and has the potential to continue to have — much more impact on our world as a freewheeling servant of the public good than he might ever be able to have living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He has, indeed, become our Waker-Upper in Chief.
BREAKING NEWS…We keep on traveling down the same roads, and then wonder why we are getting nowhere…
Yesterday Rajan Zed, a Hindu chaplain from Nevada, was invited to deliver the invocation in the chamber of the U.S. Senate in Washington. That largely ceremonial honor is usually reserved for the Senate chaplain, Reverend Barry Black. On occasion, however, other members of the clergy are invited to serve as a guest chaplain. Yesterday that person happened to be Rajan Zed, who I understand is the director of an interfaith temple in Washington D.C.
Zed addressed his prayer to “the supreme one” and asked that “He stimulate and eliminate our minds.” His prayer went on: “May your spirits be as one. Peace, peace, peace be unto all.” In the middle of the prayer, three Christians in the room are said to have shouted out, “This is an abomination! We are Americans and we are patriots!” The three unidentified protesters then began offering their own prayer, loudly from the observation gallery. The demonstrators prayed for forgiveness from Jesus Christ for “betraying” the Christian tradition. They were ushered out of the gallery by Senate security officers. But it was too late. The damage had been done.
Once again, religious intolerance rears its ugly, ugly head. Once again, humanity has reminded itself just how far it has come (not very far), and just how far it has to go in the evolution of its species. Only a few days ago Pope Benedict XVI declared to all the world that the Most Holy Roman Catholic Church is the only one true Church in all the world, that all other churches are invalid, and that even other Christian denominations are “faulty.” The Pope said that no other church offered a pathway to salvation. This is as much as saying that all people on the planet except Roman Catholics are going to hell.
This kind of behavior — the “proclamation” of the Pope, the righteousness of those demonstrators in the Senate chamber — is the shame of many Christians. I am aware (at least, I hope I am right about this) that the vast majority of Christians do not embrace or endorse such thoughts and feelings and beliefs.
Yet that is small comfort. The real question is: How much of this we are willing to look at and then turn away from without doing something about it? How much of this you believe we can all solve through simple “beingness” is something you will have to decide. What role there is for you to play in the creation of humanity’s future is the choice you are being invited to make every hour of every day of every week of every month as each year goes by. How many more years we are willing to let pass before we step in, personally, and do something about the direction in which the world is moving is the question we all have to answer for ourselves.
As to just exactly what we can do, stay tuned, right here. I will be giving you one of many possible answers to that question in the days and weeks ahead.
NOW I AM GOING TO DO SOMETHING HERE
THAT I VERY RARELY DO. I AM GOING TO
RESPOND TO A COMMENT BELOW…
About 20 Comments down there appears this Entry…
I just want to point out that you’ve written a couple times that the Pope said that no other church offers a path to salvation, when in fact he said no such thing. The document states:
“It follows that these separated churches and Communities, though we believe they suffer from defects, are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation. In fact the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose value derives from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church”.
The Catholic Church and the Pope may have other issues, but neither teaches that there is no salvation outside the Roman Catholic Church.
Posted by: SB | July 13, 2007 7:02 PM
I don;t know what to say to that, SB, except to quote now directly from the news story which appeared right here on Beliefnet.com, and from which I received my information, regarding the Pope’s declaration. That story says, in part…
Benedict, who attended Vatican II as a young theologian, has long complained about what he considers the erroneous interpretation of the council by liberals, saying it was not a break from the past but rather a renewal of church tradition.
In the latest document – formulated as five questions and answers – the Vatican seeks to set the record straight on Vatican II’s ecumenical intent, saying some contemporary theological interpretation had been “erroneous or ambiguous” and had prompted confusion and doubt.
It restates key sections of a 2000 document the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, “Dominus Iesus,” which set off a firestorm of criticism among Protestant and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the “means of salvation.”
(boldface mine)
In the new document and an accompanying commentary, which were released as the pope vacations here in Italy’s Dolomite mountains, the Vatican repeated that position.
Now I don’t know how YOU read that, SB, but I read it essentially as I have reported it. Namely, that the Pope is once again, by reiterating the Church’s earlier position on this subject, declaring that only the Most Holy Roman Catholic Church offers the “means of salvation.”
You can slice that bread any way you want to, SB, but it’s mighty hard to get away from the implication, don’t you think?
NDW
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