Excerpt #15 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
A Third Millennium Belief System
I sent my manuscript, One, A Third Millennium Belief System, to a number of publishers.
I received many polite rejections.
I put the manuscript in a drawer.
Three years later, in 1996, I felt compelled to rewrite the manuscript.
After doing so, I renamed it A Baby Boomer’s Search For Religion, From a World War II Housing Project to Harvard Divinity School.
That manuscript, too, received many polite rejections.
A couple of years later, an elderly friend of mine, physician Fred Ryersbach, asked me to speak in the community room at the Sarasota upscale development where he lived.
Fred and I often discussed religion, politics, and the state of the world.
As he wanted me to share my thoughts with his neighbors, he arranged a gathering.
About twenty-five people showed up for my talk.
It was a mixed group of mostly elderly retired, affluent and well-educated men and women.
When I finished speaking, a man said, “I’ve read 50-60 books on the subjects you just talked about.
I never heard anyone put it together like you just did.”
Another man, a retired Colgate University history professor said, “Stop whatever you’re doing and go out and teach the children what you just said.”
The Simple Truth
I was invited to speak at the Sarasota Unitarian Universalist Congregation, which led to many other invitations.
People asked me to write down what I taught.
I self-published my fifth book with the title The Simple Truth, A New Understanding of Sacredness.
During a radio interview in Tampa, Florida, Joel Chudnow, the radio personality who interviewed me described the book as “a thousand-page book in a hundred pages.”
Joel also said, “You ought to be a candidate for the Natural Law Party.”
He was aware that I had previously run for the U.S. Congress and won a Democratic Party nomination.
After the interview, unknown to me, Joel phoned the Natural Law Party.
Soon after, a representative of that party visited me at my home in Sarasota, FL and asked if I would be their candidate from Florida for the U.S. Senate in the 2000 elections.
I did not want to get involved in Third Party politics because I was aware of the odds against winning.
I declined their generous invitation.
I reconsidered, realizing it’s not every day someone knocks on your door and hands you a nomination to run for the U.S. Senate.
I told them I would be their nominee.
My candidacy would give me opportunities to speak about issues important to the country.
Press coverage turned out to be non-existent.
We had a first-class event in Sarasota when I announced my candidacy.
The press were duly invited.
The Natural Law Party presidential candidate, John Hagelin, Harvard Ph. D., was present and spoke.
About 350 people attended the event.
Not one press person showed up.
Nevertheless, a core of about twenty-five dedicated people worked on the campaign.
I went to the national convention of the Natural Law Party in August of 2000 in Virginia, just outside of D.C.
Seven Words That Can Change the World
Neale Donald Walsch, the best-selling author of the Conversations With God books, attended the convention.
He was a supporter of the Natural Law Party.
I introduced myself to Neale and asked if he would accept a humble gift, i.e., a copy of my book The Simple Truth, A New Understanding of Sacredness.
He graciously accepted the book.
A week later, Neale called to say he’d read my book on his flight home, dog-earing pages when he came upon something he could use in his lectures as he spoke all over the world.
When he got done with the book, he had marked nearly every other page.
He said he wanted to re-publish the book and change the name to Seven Words That Can Change the World, A New Understanding of Sacredness.
After publication by his publisher, Hampton Roads Publishing, I promoted it with a talk entitled “Astonish the World, Tell the Simple Truth.”
The most recent version of this book is 7 Words That Can Change the World, The Simple Truth and The Death of Sacred Cows.
“Search as you may through the traditional stories of all cultures, sacred or secular, you will find no mention of quarks, DNA, plate tectonics, or quasars. If visionaries have lived who have seen things that ordinary people could not, why did none of them get even the most basic facts about nature correct: about the evolution of life or the place of the earth in the universe? Rather, these so-called visionaries got just about everything wrong. Uniformly, they placed humankind and the earth at the center of a universe populated with angels and demons, with the human being occupying a special place just below angels. This picture bears no resemblance to that which science has provided, with the earth revolving around a relatively minor star off in the corner of a relatively minor galaxy of a hundred billion stars, in a universe of a hundred billion galaxies, and homo sapiens no more than one particularly successful mammalian species.
“The revelations in sacred books look more like the product of vivid imagination, superstition, and wishful thinking than any factual representation of the real world. If sacred revelations were so wrong about this world, how can people still believe that they tell us anything about other worlds, worlds beyond the senses, and ultimate reality?” – Victor J. Stenger, physicist and astronomer, Physics and Psychics