Surprise, Surprise!

Your Editor does not turn on the radio on Sunday mornings. But because Christmas fell on a Sunday, we went to the children’s Mass on Saturday evening. So I turned on the radio on Christmas morning. I came up with stations airing commercials, and kept turning. In the San Francisco Bay Area we have two conservative talk-show stations and only one liberal talk-show station, believe it or not. The liberal station had a program on real estate — don’t think for a moment that liberals don’t love capitalism; they just want to spread the wealth of capitalism around a little more evenly. But not being interested in real estate, I turned the dial to one of the conservative talk-show stations, a station that airs big names such as Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage.

So on Christmas Sunday morning, on that conservative station, the host was talking about religion. I perked up. He was talking about how wonderful Christmas is. Great.

But surprise, surprise! The host says that Jesus was a son of God, and we can all be sons and daughters of God if we want to be. He says we should all put aside our “rituals,” because they’re all partial, and we should blend into some overarching “God.” This “God” beyond God is a Gnostic concept. And he calls for a “merger” of all religions. It turns out that the show is called Inside Wealth, hosted by Stu Zimmerman, a self-identified child of the Sixties who is Jewish. The show is about how to make money and get rich, and presumably he likes “mergers” of all kinds. He prattles on about how Jesus had “inner wealth,” and wouldn’t it be fabulous if all the world’s religions would just get along and merge, so we could have love and peace. No mention of any afterlife, so far as I could tell.

On the liberal station, we get the same thing. Religion is reduced to a Gnostic-like secular humanism.