A Tale of two Ancient Cities

I've been corresponding with an old friend about what we believe after 60 years of living. It's interesting to look back and see how experiences have led us where we are today. This is my recollection of a part of that path.

Back in August of 1973 certain events caused me to reconsider what I believed about God, whom I had faithfully worshipped for most of my life. Business travel made possible a two week vacation in the Middle East. My religious education had been second hand from books, sermons and lectures. I decided to visit the Holy Land and look for God, then travel to Greece to see the ruins.

Over the next few days I wandered through Jerusalem, Galilee, and Nazareth. I spent an hour meditating at the crypt in Bethlehem thinking "This is where the son of the creator of the universe was born as a human being." Jerusalem had many cathedrals and shrines, bus loads of fervent tourists, countless religious souvenirs, donkeys in narrow streets, priests from many cults begging for money, tour guides pointing out sacred spots, wealth and poverty, children begging for pennies, hatred between Jew and Arab, fancy hotels, and a clean hostel run by some lovely French nuns.

In the countryside there were ragged villages, mothers begging in doorways, parched grazing land, crusader castles, abandoned tanks, barbed wire, and some Scottish Presbyterian inn-keepers who offered pilgrims a clean bed and a good meal near the Sea of Galilee. I had been looking for a blue-eyed, bearded man in a pink robe whose message was "Believe in me and you will never die." Apparently he'd been dead for some time. There was no sign of him, and except for the French and Scots precious little "love for thy neighbor". There was nothing holy about the city of Jerusalem; nothing in Nazareth or Galilee meant anything to me.

I flew on to Athens, a bustling city with fabulous art and history preserved on its Acropolis, and in its museums. There was good food and music. The city was clean and modern, if crowded. The monuments and libraries honored Solon, Cleisthenes and Aristides, Pericles, Phidias, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Socrates and Aristotle, Epicurus, Aeschylus and Euripides. Cicero and Atticus had come here to study. I had come here to escape the specter of the Holy Land. Sitting in the Greek sunshine, in a Hellenic amphitheater I reached a conclusion and made a choice. I traded faith for reason and humanism. The Christian God was either a hoax or a myth. Old and new, Athens was real, a truly holy city.

While I miss the ceremonies and community of Christianity on Sundays, I enjoy living in my Hellenist culture during the week. Everywhere there are theaters, art galleries, law courts, markets, libraries, gardens, athletic games, book stores, juries, elections, and even a constitution for our democratic state. Like the little girl in the red shoes said, there is no place like home.

The Nature of Things

"When human life lay groveling on the ground, crushed by superstition glaring menacingly down from the sky, a man of Greece was first to raise mortal eyes in defiance, to stand erect and challenge. Fables of the gods did not crush him, nor lightening's flash nor thunder's growl. Instead they gave him courage to smash the locks on nature's door. His mind ventured far out beyond the flaming ramparts of the world, voyaging through the infinite heavens. Returning victorious, he proclaimed to us what can and cannot be, and the limits to the powers of nature. Now it is superstition that lies crushed beneath his feet; and we, by his triumph, are lifted equal with the sky."

- T. Lucretius Carus, "de rerum natura" 55 BCE