It is the thesis of this book that we need a Christology that preserves divinity, but one that rejects the claim that this divinity is found only in Jesus of Nazareth.
Instead of religion acting as a support system for the individual, it has become a suppressor of the individual for the perpetuation of the institution by demanding individual subservience.
A spirituality that does not provide a source of meaning for humanity does not deserve to survive. That is the reason why organized religion is becoming more and more impotent and irrelevant.
"People should be more interested in a writer's work than in the person of a writer. Writers, in other words, should be heard and not seen. It is very dangerous for a writer to become a public personality; I can think of one American novelist [Ernest Hemingway], recently dead, who became so convinced that he was, in fact, the public image of himself that it did serious damage to his work. And the better the writer, of course, the more interesting his work in comparison to himself."
If you drink too much, "You're either going to be a nice Irish drunk or you're going to be a monster. I turned into a monster."
An artillery battery commander explained, “The ammo kept coming whether or not we had targets for it, so the batteries fired their allotments every opportunity they had, whether there was actually anything to shoot at or not.”
“There are more civilians killed here per day than VC either by accident or on purpose and that’s just plain murder. I’m not surprised that there are more VC. We make more VC than we kill by the way these people are treated. I won’t go into detail but some of the things that take place would make you ashamed of good old America.”
The person who did the most to try to stop that confrontation, Henry Wallace, has been largely lost to history. Few people remember how close Wallace came to getting the vice presidential nomination on that steamy Chicago night in July 1944. What might this country have become had Wallace succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945 instead of Truman? Would atomic bombs still have been used in World War II? Could we have avoided the nuclear arms race and the Cold War? Would civil rights and women’s rights have triumphed in the immediate postwar years? Might colonialism have ended decades earlier and the fruits of science and technology been spread more equitably around the globe? We’ll never know.
Charles Deemer teaches screenwriting at Portland State University. He is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and pioneer in hyperdrama. He was the editor of Oregon Literary Review and the artistic director of Small Screen Video.
"Having written almost daily for over 40 years, I can say that writing is not a job or a vocation or a profession--it is an existence. It is a way of being in the world."
"Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street." Mary Ellen Lease, 1890
"All humanity's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room," - Blaise Pascal.
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