What is Faith?

By Erika Waalkes, Age 15

For me, “Faith” is a very complex word. For many people this is the word they live by, and for others it is not even part of their life.

When I looked up faith in the dictionary, one of the definitions was, “any set of firmly held principles or beliefs.” This can mean so many different things. It can refer to religion, what you believe, or it can simply be how you live your life.

For me personally, I see faith as how I journey through life and my values; being a good person, helping others, and working hard to achieve my dreams. In other words, I try to live by the golden rule. Treating others how I want them to treat me. I think this is a rule everyone should live by.

Ironically, the golden rule is found in all major religions, just in different words. In Buddhism it is, “hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” In Hinduism it is, “this is the sum of duty; do naught onto others what you would not have them do unto you.” And what I appreciate about these words is that growing up and going to All Souls Church, I have learned that these are powerful words of wisdom. If everyone lived by them, the world would be at peace.

For many people, their faith is dependent on their belief in a higher power than themselves. They worship and pray to this God or Gods. Living in west Michigan, I have been asked many times about my religion. Depending on who the person is, I’ll explain what I believe and what kind of church I go to. After describing my faith, I am often asked, “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” I’ll say, “No, but I respect what you believe.” Normally, I’m criticized for what I believe, and the person tries to save me. I wonder why? If I respect and honor what they believe, why can’t they afford to do the same for me?

Many people who believe in God say that it helps them to be a good person; it gives them comfort in their journey through life. I respect this. However, at this point in time, I don’t believe in God or any higher power.

For me growing up as a Unitarian/Universalist has significantly influenced my life. I think that learning the “Seven (7) Principles” has made me a better person. It has taught me that if you are kind to everyone, life will be so much more enjoyable. It has also helped me in school. In seventh grade, my history teacher handed out a quiz on Buddhism. I was the only student to receive an A. I am sure that was because I had learned about all the major religions in church.

Being a part of the “Coming of Age” program, I have learned more about Unitarian Universalism. I have many good memories, and I have improved my public speaking. I look forward to taking the skills that I have learned through this program, and applying them throughout my life. I have also discovered what “faith” means to me, and how I apply it to my life. I ask that when you go home, to think about if faith is part of your life. If so, what does it mean to you? How does it guide your life?

1. Prodigious amounts of misinformation acquired wittingly/unwittingly.
2. Constant guilt due to thinking one is not pleasing God. This occurs when old religious fears are not properly cremated.
3. The loss of cognitive thinking skills, an inability to think for oneself.
4. An insatiable need to have other people or groups do one’s thinking.
5. The inability to articulate well-thought-out religious/philosophical beliefs.
6. A potentially unhealthy attraction to high-control fundamentalist groups promising God’s truth & the correct interpretation of the Bible.
7. The inability to tolerate the insecurity of anything outside the sphere of physical science and a person’s conscious experiences.
8. A need to control other people. (When you’re abused, you can abuse)
9. A lack of self-control related to sex, alcohol or drugs.
10. The inability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.
11. Black and white thinking, as answers were always found in the WT.
12. Difficulty understanding that the only things a person can control are one’s beliefs about events, people, circumstances, etc.
13. Difficulty assimilating into mainstream society due to JW phobias.
14. Stuck on constantly blaming the organization for robbing the best years of one’s life and unable to acknowledge one’s duplicity.
15. Obsessive time and energy spent on projects intended to topple the organization. (Expose them, yes. Toppling them isn’t going to happen as JWs fill a market niche for people in need of heavy-duty structure.)
16. A propensity to underline in ink key points in magazines and books.
17. Suffering persistent shunning by JW family and friends. (For many people, this is the most brutal ghost, and can be severely debilitating.)

I believe the most invasive of the ghosts is misinformation. Shedding “things a person knows that ain’t so” is a very challenging task. It requires cremating old religious fears. It may take years. But it can be done. If I were to leave the organization today, my recovery plan would include reading the following six books, in this order, and here’s why:

1. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. The author gives a moving account of his life in Nazi death camps and his discovery of logo therapy—a positive approach to the mentally/spiritually disturbed person. His treatment focuses on the freedom to transcend suffering and find a meaning to one’s life regardless of circumstances.
2. The Source by James A. Michener. A great bit of storytelling based on factual data about early civilization in Israel, debunking JW myths.
3. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Okay, he’s an atheist, but a person coming out of a group like JWs will appreciate and relate to his hard-hitting, factual observations about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and the dangerous rise of superstition in today’s world. (This is a good book to test your ability to hold two opposed ideas in your mind and still retain the ability to function.)
4. Jesus, Interrupted – Revealing the Hidden Contradiction in the Bible by Bart D. Ehrman. Jehovah’s Witnesses are completely in the dark as to what scholars have been saying for 200 years about Bible history, forgeries, and contradictions. Whichever side a person sits on biblical inerrancy, this is an eye-opening read.
5. The Sins of Scripture by John Shelby Spong. This book exposes the evil done by people who use the Bible like weapons in the name of God. It points out texts that have been used to discriminate, oppress and distort the truth of Christianity, casting doubt on God’s love.
6. Why Evolution is True by Jerry A. Coyne. I hate the title, but after years of hearing non-scholarly JW evolution rebuttal, this well-written explanation by a knowledgeable scientist gives the reader a fresh, nonthreatening perspective of how old our earth is and how new species evolved from previous ones. And, it makes a good case for the fact that God is not a micro-manager, as JWs claim.

If you read these books, you will have lots to think about. It will help to get outside yourself and subconsciously cogitate about what you’ve read. Take walks, meet new people, do random acts of kindness, volunteer for charitable work, engage yourself in a hobby, be a friend to someone, etc. Remember, great thinkers can hold two opposing ideas in their minds at the same time and function quite well.

You will also be rewarded with the satisfaction that you have acquired real truths—liberating, factual information—which have heretofore been censored for you by the organization. Embrace this wonderful opportunity to learn about things from a rational perspective. In the end, do not forget that you have the freedom to decide what you want to believe.

• We do not have the original writings of the New Testament. What we have are copies of these writings, made years later—in most cases, many years later. And none of these copies is completely accurate since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places. All scribes did this.



• There are more differences among preserved manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
• The twenty-seven books we call the New Testament were not gathered into one canon and considered scripture, finally and ultimately, until hundreds of years after the books themselves were first produced.
• We do not know precisely how old the New Testament is. It could be 1,200 years; we just don’t know. But we do know that it’s not 2,000 years old as I was taught growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness.
• The third-century church father Origen, made the following complaint about the copies of the Gospel at his disposal: “The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.”
• The story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery in John 7:53 – 8:12 is arguably the best known story about Jesus in the Bible. It is a brilliant story, filled with pathos and a clever twist where Jesus uses his wits to get himself—not to mention the poor woman—off the hook. However, to the careful reader, the story raises many questions. To name just two:
  • If Jesus did teach a message of love, did he really think that the Law of God given by Moses was no longer in force and should be obeyed?
  • Did he think sins should not be punished at all?
• Good questions, but as it turns out, the aforementioned verses were not originally in the Gospel of John. In fact, they were not originally part of any of the Gospels. Scribes added these twelve verses later. This story and these verses are not found in the oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John and the writing style is very different from what is found in the rest of John.
• The last twelve verses in the Gospel of Mark were invented by a scribe many years after it was in circulation, and absent from the two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel. It’s a mysterious, moving, and powerful passage and used by Pentecostal Christians to show Jesus’ followers could speak in unknown tongues. Ironically, it’s also the principal passage used by “Appalachian snake-handlers” who take poisonous snakes in their hands to prove their faith in the words of Jesus.
• Paul did not write verses 34 and 35 in 1 Corinthians 14. They were added by a scribe, possibly influenced by 1 Timothy 2, which we know was written by a follower of Paul, not by Paul. (1 Timothy was forged in Paul’s name by someone living later.)
• The anti-Jewishness of some second- and third-century Christian scribes played a role in how the texts of scripture were transmitted. One of the clearest examples is found in Luke’s account of the crucifixion, where Jesus is said to have uttered a prayer for those responsible: “And when they came to the place that is called ‘The Skull,’ they crucified him there, along with criminals, one on his right and the other on his left. And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.’” (Luke 23:33-34) As it turns out, this prayer of Jesus cannot be found in the oldest manuscripts which date back to about 200 C.E. It’s first found in manuscripts produced during the Middle Ages.
• The Christian scribes—whether of the early centuries or of the Middle Ages—not only copied scripture, they changed scripture. Sometimes they didn’t mean to – they were simply tired, or inattentive, or on occasion, inept. At other times, though, they meant to make changes, as when they wanted the text to emphasize precisely what they personally believed about the nature of Christ, or about the role of women in the church, or about the wicked character of their Jewish opponents. (In the 1950s, Jehovah’s Witnesses rewrote the Bible, calling it The New World Translation, to make it fit their unique beliefs. So it should not come as a surprise that this type of thing happened many, many times in the long history of the Bible.)

How the Bible was finalized – a basic history…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXFYgI5kld4

I did my research and talked to several friends. As it turns out, Rick and his wife, Inez, are fully committed to a very unique ministry that exposes the false teachings and hypocrisy of the Watchtower Society. It didn’t take me long to decide to appear on his show.

Fearon’s site, along with FreeMinds.org, Ex-JW.com, and BRCI.org , to name just a few, are all doing a great job sharing the truth about this dangerous cult.

I dialed into the show at 6:35 PM and listened in on an active conversation between several ex-JWs and people studying cult behavior. One of the alarming observations came from a disfellowshipped woman whose son was a known pedophile. She knew that he and society would be better off if he was in jail, but his local congregation’s elders were protecting him. They had no intention of reporting him to the local police because they believed his confession and resolve to stop his sordid behavior was enough evidence for them to forgive him of his sins.

At 7:00 PM, Rick closed the outside lines so that only the two of us could talk while assuring his phoned-in audience that there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of listeners already listening to the call.

Rick spoke for twenty-five minutes, sharing the goals for the Six Screens Ministry and reporting new developments in the activity and loss of members for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Promptly at 7:25 PM, Rick began the interview. For well over an hour he asked me questions about why I wrote my book, Growing Up in Mama’s Club, what my childhood was like, what I liked and disliked about Bethel, etc.

During the interview, he expressed his belief in the inevitable demise of the Watchtower Society in the very near future – which I took exception to. While I would certainly love to see such a thing happen, cult-like religions exist because they appeal to a certain type of people who cannot find what they are looking for in mainstream religion. All in all, I found Rick an enthusiastic and gracious host.

Finally Rick reopened the telephone lines to allow listeners to ask questions, which I found interesting and challenging. One caller from Kansas asked me to share some of the humorous events that occurred during my childhood. One woman, who had never been a Club member, called to tell me how entertaining my book was. She really enjoyed learning what being a Jehovah’s Witness was like. A caller from Washington expressed concern about the high incidence of child molestation among members of the Club. Another caller from Georgia asked when my sequel, Ghosts from Mama’s Club, would be published. I told him that it would be available in six months.

I enjoyed the nearly three-hour experience on the phone and look forward to hearing good results from Rick and Inez Fearon’s ministry on “Six Screens of the Watchtower” in the months ahead.

Shortly after the conference call, I checked my emails and was pleased to receive the following message from one of my good friends who encouraged me to be on Rick’s show: “I’m two hours into your call and you are doing great. You really hit the ball out of the park. You are calm, logical, and very friendly.”

“Not only are most Americans ignorant of the contents of the Bible, but they are also almost completely in the dark about what scholars have been saying about it for the past two centuries” reports Bart Ehrman, a well respected professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. In his book, Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman shares many well-written and revealing truths supporting his assertion. A few of them are:

• The Old Testament consists of thirty-nine books written by dozens of authors over at least six hundred years. And Moses did not write the first five books. In fact, it is hard to know if he ever existed.
• The New Testament was written by sixteen or seventeen authors over a period of seventy years. Only eight of the twenty-seven books are written by the people traditionally thought to be the authors. Most of the books are written not by apostles, but by later writers claiming to be apostles

• When Paul wrote his letters (penned before the Gospels) to the churches he founded, he did not think he was writing the Bible. So, too, with the Gospels. Mark, whatever his real name was, had no idea his book (the first Gospel to be written) would be put into a collection with three other books and called Scripture; and he did not think that his book should be interpreted in light of what other Gospel writers would write some thirty years later in different countries and in a different context.
• The idea that Jesus preexisted his birth and that he was a divine being who became human is found only in the Gospel of John; the idea that he was born of a virgin is found only in Matthew and Luke.
• In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus never refers to himself as a divine being, as someone who preexisted, as someone who was in any sense equal to God. In Mark, he is not God and he does not claim to be. In fact, he confirms his fallibility in this Gospel by repeatedly predicting that the end will come right away, during his own generation, while his disciples are still alive.
• The Gospels for the most part do not provide disinterested factual information about Jesus, but contain stories that had been in oral circulation for decades before being written down. This makes it very difficult to know what Jesus actually said, did, and experienced.
• There were lots of other Gospels available to the early Christians, as well as epistles, Acts, and apocalypses. Many of these claimed to be written by apostles, who, with the exception of Paul, could most likely neither read nor write.
• The creation of the Christian canon was not the only invention of the early Church. A whole range of theological perspectives came into existence, not during the life of Jesus or even through the teachings of his original apostles but later, as the Church grew and came to be transformed into a new religion rather than a sect of Judaism.

And while the list of things we know about the Bible that ain’t so goes on and on, one of the most striking of the truths is:

• There is only one book in the New Testament, 1 Timothy—forged in Paul’s name by someone living later—that states that a woman’s place in the church is to be silent and to “exercise no authority over a man.” What’s amazing to learn is that in the books that Paul really does write, this policy is clearly at odds with what he preached and practiced.

Bart Ehrman explains his research about the Bible . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBtShL6LfoU

When l was growing up, I was taught that the Bible was the inspired Word of God; that God put His thoughts into the minds of writers like the faithful prophets and apostles to make it historically inerrant. I was told that it’s God’s book with no mistakes and no contradictions – and that’s what most American Christians still believe today

As it turns out, that’s not what’s taught in mainstream Christian seminaries. Scholars have made significant progress in understanding the Bible over the last 200 years and the results of their studies are regularly and routinely taught to university graduate students and prospective pastors.

In Bart D. Ehrman’s book, Jesus, Interrupted – Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them), the author reports that not only are most Americans ignorant about the contents of the Bible, they are completely in the dark about what scholars have been saying about it for the past two centuries. This is what motivated Ehrman to write this book.

With this bold claim driving me, I decided to check it out. Ehrman’s excellent writing skills make his book easy to read and it’s definitely an eye opener. But still, it gnawed at me as to why this information is not more widely known; it gives credence to Will Rogers’ quote, “It’s not what we don’t know that gives us trouble; it’s what we know that ain’t so.”

So I’ve decided to share with our readers some of what I’ve learned from Ehrman’s book in this and future articles.

The first thing you need to know is that I personally don’t believe this information is a threat to anyone espousing true Christianity; I think it should actually enhance their faith. The Bible makes better sense if readers acknowledge its inconsistencies, instead of staunchly insisting that there absolutely are none within its pages.

All of the books in the Bible are distinct and shouldn’t be read as if they’re all saying the same thing—even when they’re talking about the same subject.

So what are some of the things we think we know about the Bible that ain’t so?

• We don’t know for sure who wrote the four Gospels: Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. These books were originally written anonymously and not by any of the apostles because they were all illiterate and couldn’t read or write.



• The authors of the New Testament actually have differing views about Jesus and how salvation works.
• The New Testament contains books that were forged in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later.
• Established Christian doctrines—such as “the suffering messiah,” “the divinity of Jesus,” and “the Trinity”—were actually the inventions of still later theologians.
• There are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were considered canonical— including other Gospels allegedly written by Jesus’ followers, Peter, Thomas, and Mary.
• The account of Creation in Genesis 1 is very different from the account in Genesis 2. Not only is the wording and writing style different (particularly when read in Hebrew), the two chapters actually use different names for God, and the content of the chapters differs greatly.

This is just a small sample of the many interesting, well-researched new facts that I’ve learned about the Bible from reading Ehrman’s book, Jesus, Interrupted. I’ll be sharing more with our readers in the near future.

[Photo credits: Dave Hiebert (feature graphic, Bible verse closeup); Piotr Bizior (Man with book)]

He also shares the following 1981 quote from the father of the USA conservative movement, Barry Goldwater: “There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this Supreme Being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of these political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who think it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I’m warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.”

Today, Douglas Adams says that respected writers and politicians, particularly in the United States, are no longer willing to challenge religious ideas. They are not allowed to say those things. And yet, when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other. Fortunately, it was a Brit, Richard Dawkins, who had the courage to speak up, fervently believing that religious extremists are a serious threat to democracy and human betterment. His book, The God Delusion is easy to read and loaded with facts to support those assertions.

“Oh, but he’s an Atheist,” some will say. But be reminded that people like Einstein and Carl Sagan, to name just a few, did not believe in a personal god. However, that didn’t diminish the scientific data they accumulated and shared in their lifetime.

My mother, a hard-core Jehovah’s Witness, won’t read the book. Her church leaders tell her that it is “the work of the Devil.” That’s a pretty good reason why I think a thinking person would want to do otherwise.

What Richard Dawkins has to say and how he says it in The God Delusion is not only an important work of science, but a clear, articulate warning of what could happen if the current wave of passionate religious irrationality is allowed to continue unchecked. It is one of the best books I have read in the last ten years and I agree with the New York Times Book Review when it said that The God Delusion contained “Lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes.”

While it’s true that I made the initial suggestion and recommendations on how to accomplish this goal, I had no idea how excited and energized John would become with the process of CI. Ever since that discussion he has been a human dynamo in implementing new ideas and testing new techniques.  Now, after several months of trial and error, we are prepared to share our improvement plan with our readers.

Our first and most important move will be to add four, or possibly five, additional contributors to our writing staff. These men and women are all published authors who share a down-to-earth, common sense view of life.  Our common goal will be to share well-thought-out opinions on a broad range of interesting, relevant, and timely topics that each of us feel passionate about.

One important goal for JustOneOpinion.com will be to share “Blue Sky Ideas,” totally outside-the-box suggestions, about how we could make our world a better place to live now and far into the future. Just imagine how we could take totally fresh approaches to utilizing energy from a wide variety of resources, improving easily accessible health care, and converting to non-polluting electric vehicles – all subjects for future articles.

We will also take a critical look at the current administration of criminal law, the lack of public transportation, economic theory and practice, and the lack of ethics in government - as well as beaurocratic “environmental protection” that ignores common sense and wastes taxpayer money.

We will track what President-elect Obama and the Democrats promised to do before the election. We will report the results of their progress by highlighting universal health care, stem cell research, the economy, a new energy policy, and middle-class tax relief.

We will include feature articles on different countries, cultures, and their key factions. We will tackle the issues of religion and science and their proper place in a modern democracy. We will promote civility at every level of political discourse while encouraging rigorous debate. We will review and recommend books, movies and other media that might make a difference in our lives. We will often take differing views as we debate the effects of “global warming” and offer suggestions as to what, if anything, needs to be done to alleviate its effects.

Our goal will not be to bring you the “TRUTH”, as my mother insisted her view of world events and her interpretation of the Bible were. Instead we want to focus JustOneOpinion’s articles in a way that will help our readers in their “search for the truth.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to religion or politics, we realize that “true believers” are often unable to participate in constructive dialogue. But for those people who consider themselves “open-minded,” our goal will be to help them discard “those things that they know that ain’t so,” as Will Roger’s called them, and to expand their body of knowledge about important issues of the day.

We hope that our approach will provide people with additional ideas, concepts, and new strategies to improve the quality of our life today and for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. To assist us in our learning curve, JOO welcomes the additional insights of four new writers. They are Craig Bieber, Chi Newman, and Bob and Claire Rogers.  Let me introduce them:

CRAIG L. BIEBER

published his first book, Saylor’s Triangle, in January 2008. His book is available at Amazon.com or from his website  SaylorsTriangle.com. Craig was born, raised, and educated in a small ranching town in western South Dakota where imagination, dreams, and literature were his windows to the world. Before he retired, Craig spent forty adventurous years in Alaska, working in the oil industry. He and his wife Claudia now spend six months a year in Anchorage and six months in Tucson, Arizona. Find out more about Craig by visiting his website. And you will not want to miss his first post on JOO entitled, “White Hats and Black Hats.” 

CHI NEWMAN

grew up in Beijing, China, amid manicured courtyards, servants, powerful friends, and lavish entertainments. She attended an exclusive convent school where she learned to speak French and English. At the age of thirteen, Chi’s world turned upside down. To escape the Communists, her parents gave her a small suitcase and put her on a plane to Nanjing. What followed was a fifty-year journey she could not possibly have imagined. Read her story in Farewell, My Beijing: The Long Journey from China to Tucson (available from Amazon.com) or at Chi-Newman.com.

Claire Rogers

writes about the environment, literacy, astronomy, history, adventure travel, sports and fitness, recreational vehicles, and personality profiles. She also writes book and product reviews. Claire recently received a commendation from the Lake County Astronomical Society for an article that appeared in the nationally distributed magazine Geico Direct. Her other publishing credits include the Desert Leaf, the Arizona Daily Star, Highways, and MotorHome and Trailer Life. She enjoys hiking, biking, adventure travel and good times with friends and family.

Robert “Bob” Rogers

(Claire’s husband), worked as a television reporter during undergraduate school before earning an MFA in visual arts at Ohio University. His photojournalism skills led to a popular daily essay in the Athens Messenger. He was published in Et Cetera literary magazine and won two first prizes for short stories in the “Tidepools” literary competition. His first book, a novel titled The Return of No. 44, will be published early in 2009. His earlier work, Tandem, An American Love Story, was represented by the Claudia Menza Agency in 1997. He is working on a second novel while teaming with his wife on a book proposal about sharing their methods for achieving an adventurous lifestyle and financial independence. Bob and Claire are world travelers, including China, Australia, Iceland, and Canada, much of the time on a tandem bicycle, 39,000 miles and counting. They have also spent four months sailing in the South Pacific plus over 60,000 miles of motor home travel in North America. You can read more about Claire and Bob in his own eloquent words at New Bohemians.net. And you will not want to miss Bob’s most recent post on JOO entitled, “The New Homeless.”

In addition to these new contributors, we are hopeful that other interested readers of http://JustOneOpinion.com will contribute their opinions or submit articles about specific topics that are important to them.

As a boy of fifteen, Samuel Clemens had an acquaintance he was very fond of – a delightful young black man named Jerry – a slave – who had the daily habit of preaching sermons from the top of his master’s woodpile. He imitated the pulpit style of the clergymen of his day, and did it well. One of Jerry’s favorite texts was, “You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell what his ‘pinions is.”

It seems that the black philosopher’s idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he was to prosper, he had to train with the majority; in matters like politics and religion, he had to think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing. In other words, he had to restrict himself to corn-pone opinions – at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views.

Mark Twain thought Jerry was right, in the main, but he did not go far enough. It was Twain’s belief that a man conforms to the majority view of his locality by calculation and intention; that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion is a most rare thing – if indeed it ever existed. Basic human instinct moved one to conformity. It is man’s nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. The cause is the inborn requirement of self-approval. And its source is the approval of other people.

We get our notions and habits and opinions from outside influences; we don’t study them. We are creatures of outside influences; as a rule we do not think, we only imitate.

The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. Morals, religions, politics, get their following from surrounding influences and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from study, not from thinking.

Why are Catholics, Catholics; Baptists, Baptists; Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jehovah’s Witnesses; Republicans, Republicans; and Democrats, Democrats? Mark Twain believed it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination, that hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon religion or politics which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there is nothing but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval.

Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently. They arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand which is of no particular value.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it’s the Voice of God.

Now I don’t know if my awareness of corn-pone opinions is why I have no religious affiliation or why I can’t join a political party. But I’m not ashamed to admit that a lot of what I believe, I learned from Mark Twain. Like he said, “The trouble with the world is not that people know so little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.”

Esther and I have chosen “Two Remarkable Stories of Growing Up in Cults – Told with Compassion & Humor” as the title of our presentation. The format will be a lively interactive discussion between us talking about growing up in two totally different cults – Old Order Mennonites and Jehovah’s Witnesses – with surprising and shocking commonalities between these two very unique and secretive groups.