Religion

22209. phillipdavid--April 13, 1998--8:04 p.m. PST

A little liberal missive:

If you go out into the streets of a city and you are observant, you are going to see all types of human emotions written on the faces of people.

I believe with everything they go through, people are basically searching for God, even though they may not think of it as such. And do you know what! God is searching for them, too--which does pose quite a problem to our understanding: If God is searching for them and they're searching for God, why don't they get together?

It's the blasted religions! That's why they don't get together.

Mahatma Gandhi put it very succinctly: He said the reason he didn't become a Christian--he wanted to be, you know, he loved that "Lead, Kindly Light"--was because most of the Christians took a little inoculation of religion as proof against the real thing. He didn't observe that Christians were truly Christlike. They said, "I'll go this far: I'll join the church, I'll go to church, I'll be good"--but they never really had an internal revolution where God came out on top. The human will prevailed all the way.

Louis Fischer writes in his anthology on Gandhi that Gandhi's Christian friends taught him the essence of Christianity. They said if he believed in Jesus he would find redemption. "If this be the Christianity acknowledged by all Christians, I cannot accept it...I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin. I seek to be redeemed from sin itself....Until I have attained that end, I shall be content to be restless."

Gandhi liked the sweet Christian hymns and many of the Christians he met. But he could not regard Christianity as the perfect religion or the greatest religion.

"...It was impossible for me to believe that I could go to heaven or attain salvation only by becoming a Christian.... I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born....