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General News    H4'ed 2/20/13

Transcript Part II: Former Catholic Priest Matthew Fox on Ratzinger, Opus Dei and the Broken Catholic Church

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The catholic Monk Thomas Merton had this great line, he said "How is it possible to tell everybody walking around that they're all filled with a brilliance like the sun?  How is it possible to tell one another we're all filled with brilliance, a brilliant light like the sun?"  And that's the Cosmic Christ position, that Christ is the light within all things.  And that tradition, the mystical tradition, has not been passed on well the last century, either in Protestantism or Catholicism,  and it's very important to being this back.  This is where the excitement lives, and this is where we can connect to other deep mystical traditions: Sufism from Islam, Buddhism from the East, and other traditions as well.

 

Rob Kall:   I've long believed that - Maslow said something like. "The founders of religion are very wise and inspired, but as soon as the religion becomes an institution, it gets ruined."  Do you think there is a way... Pardon me?

 

Matthew Fox:   There's a lot of truth to that.  Father Bede Griffiths, who I mentioned earlier, said the same thing.  He said, "Every religion begins with a mystical experience."  The Buddha under the Bodhi tree, Jesus in his context, Isaiah, all of it.  But, he said, "When you have these experiences, then you'll put them in language because you want to tell others about it, then it gets in a doctrine, because you kind of want to spell it out, and pretty soon it gets away, because the Left Brain, and the Dogmatists, and the Canon Lawyers, and the accountants, take over." 

 

So you have to be continually -- there's a good line in Catholicism, Ecclesia semper reformanda:  "The church is always needing to be reformed."  And that is true, you always have to go back to the inspiration of the original source, snd get away from this pile of Canon Laws, and church buildings, and basilicas, and Papal pronouncements.  Utterly, religion is something very simple.  It is about the heart being turned on, to be generous, and to be just, and to be courageous enough to pull that off; and to be compassionate, and to celebrate. 

 

That's what it comes down to, and we're at one of these times of history when we have to simplify, we have to come back to the real meaning, not just of the Christ event, but of the Buddha event.  The Buddhists have to clean their act up.  The Muslims have to clean their act up.  The Jews have to clean their act up.  The time for the shaking down our religions to get to the distillation of it, and then linking up with the distillation of each, and create a new thing, with the help of science.

Rob Kall:   What about Atheism?  Where does that fit in?  How do you see...

 

Matthew Fox:   It has a real place to play, because Atheism helps us to criticize, frankly, the idols of religion.  Like I talked earlier about Papalolatry, which happens when television takes over the Vatican.  So, I think Atheism has it's place for sure. 

 

But there are many kinds of Atheism, you know, we think there's only one kind.  It's like Protestantism, there's all versions of it.  Some Atheism is anti-Theism.  Theism says God is up in the sky, and the rest of us live here.  So I'm an anti-Theist also.  I call my perspective Pan-entheism:  Everything is in God, and God is in everything.  That makes me an anti-Theist.  So from that point of view, I would be an Atheist. 

 

Meister Eckhart, one of the great Christian mystics, a Dominican like I was, says, "I pray God to rid me of God."  So if that's not close to Atheism, I don't know what is.  So in a way, questioning our God is something we all have to do, and Atheists are on that track.  Now, you know, some atheists, some of these people making big bucks by going on television and publishing books and all - I'm not impressed by the amount of Ego in a lot of that.

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness (more...)
 

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