Check, please!

It hardly matters, it does not matter, but let's unravel the edge of time

"I love everybody! I love everything! Some people seem to make mistakes, but everything and everybody has something of value to contribute or they would not be here. I love humanity, which has been a constant delight to me during all my life; and I love flowers, trees animals and all the works of Nature as they pass before us in time and space. What joy life is when you have made a close working partnership with Nature... All things--plants, animals, and men--are already in eternity traveling across the face of time, whence we know not, whiter who is able to say. Let us have one world at a time and let us make the journey one of joy to our fellow passengers and just as convenient and happy for them as we can, and trust the rest as we trust life. Let us read the Bible without the ill-fitting colored spectacles of theology, just as we read other books, using our own judgment and reason, listening to the voice, not to the noisy babble without. Most of us possess discriminating reasoning powers. Can we use them or must we be fed by others like babes? I love especially to look into the deep, worshipful, liquid eye of Bonita my dog, whose devotion is as profound and lasting as life itself. But better yet, I love to look into the fearless, honest trusting eyes of a child who so long has been said by theologians to be conceived and born in sin and pre-damned at birth. Do you believe all our teacher without question? I can not. We must ‘prove all things’ and ‘hold fast that which is good.’ What does the bible mean when it distinctly says, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’? Works count far more than the words with those who think clearly. Euripides long ago said, ‘Who dares not speak his free thought is a slave.’ I reiterate: The religion of most people is what they would like to believe, not what they do believe, and very few stop to examine its foundation underneath. The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me–the ravings of insanity, superstition gone to seed! I don’t want to have anything to do with such a God. I am a lover of man and of Christ as a man and his work, and all things that help humanity; but never the less just as he was an infidel then, I am an infidel today. I prefer and claim the right to worship the infinite, everlasting, almighty God of this vast universe as revealed to us gradually, step by step, by the demonstrable truths of our savior, science. Do you think Christ or Mohammed, Confucius, Baal or even the gods of ancient mythology are dead? Not so. Do you think Pericles, Marcus Aurelius, Moses, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Aristotle, Tolstoi, Franklin, Emerson are dead? No. Their very personality lives, and will live forever in our lives and lives of all those who will follow us. All of them are with us today. No one lives who is not influenced, more or less, by these great ones according to the capacity of the cup of knowledge which they bring to these ever flowing fountains to be filled. Olive Schreiner says: ‘Holiness is an infinite compassion for others; greatness is to take the common things of live and walk truly among them. All things on earth have their price; and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honor is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth every step you set your foot down on your own heart. For the little soul that cries aloud for continued personal existence for itself and its beloved, there is not help. For the soul which knows itself no more as a unit, but a part of the Universal Unity of which the beloved also is a part, which feels within itself the throb of the Universal life–for that soul there is no death.;” -Luther Burbank

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Notes

November 25, 2011