VINE DELORIA JR, GOODBYE

Vine Deloria JR. passed away on Nov. 13, 2005, that hurts.He was by far one of the great thinkers of our time and had quite an effect on the way I see the world so i will leave you with some ideas,actually quotes of his to make you think.
" In most human cultures religious and scientific leaders have shared two traits: They have pretended to be the sole repository of knowledge, and they have been damn smug about it. The average citizen has traditionally deferred to these two groups and allowed them a sembalance of authority in matters of faith and knowledge. Thus theologians and scientists have become the source of truth and have been responsible for its transmission. But while these two groups have been the source and authority for truth, they have rarely been the initiators of it. The truth they have protected has nearly always been obsolete, framed in outmoded concepts, and defended zealously against heresy. Truth, under these conditions, has become a matter of authority rather than inquiry. The sin of abusing authority falls equally on science and religion; for every Galileo that can be citied, there stands a Velikovsky."

"In the western traditions, revelation has generally been interpreted as the communication to human beings of a divine plan, the release of new information and insights when the deity has perceived that mankind has reached the fullness of time and can now understand additional knowledge about the ultimate nature of our world. Thus, what has been the manifestation of deity in a particular local situation is mistaken for a truth applicable to all times and places, a truth so powerful that it must be impressed upon peoples who have no connection to the event or to the cultural complex in which it originally made sense. The recounting of the event becomes its major value and both metaphysics and ethics are believed to be contained in the description of the event. Ultimately the religion becomes a matter of imposing the ethical perspective derived from reprocessing the religious experience on foreign cultures and not in following whatever moral dictates might have been gleaned from the experience."

Thank You for expanding my horizons