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Showing posts from April 15, 2012

Does religion sell us short?

Carl Sagan, the great astronomer and author, once said that religion “assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they’ll behave.” He believed that religion sells people short and diminishes their ability to solve their own problems. There is truth in that. I find myself strongly in agreement with him. I grew up in the church. I wanted to be a professional baseball player or a broadcast journalist but I ended up being a Christian minister instead. A lot of it was because my parents instilled in me the notion that service to God was the highest calling available. They were deeply religious and it was difficult to ever get away from the idea that nothing much mattered except a life of devotion to the church. I spent 22 years in active ministry—preaching, teaching, writing, studying, digging into the Bible for answers to life, wrestling with the very conservative beliefs of my denomination, questioning hell and sin and judgment, reading the classical theologians, t