Bill Darlison: Roads for Travelling Souls

Gerald Massey I've been reading the works of Gerald Massey (1828-1907) recently. Described as 'Chartist, Poet, Radical, Freethinker', he was an autodidact who became something of a self-styled expert in Egyptology. He claimed that the Christian story was poached from Egyptian mythology, a theory which, although receiving no support from academia, has influenced contemporary avant garde thinkers such as Acharya S., Tom Harpur, and the author of the Zeitgeist video. In one of his essays, he considers what the religion of the future will be like. I think most of this will appeal to Unitarians. Here's the final paragraph. The rest, along with a biography and numerous other essays can be found at   http://gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/biog_contents.htm Possibly my Coming Religion may suggest a coming revolution?  I should not wonder if it does.  Anyway, we mean to do our own thinking, and to have absolute freedom of thought and expression.  We mean to re...

A sermon preached in Dublin in July 2005 At the beginning of June 2005, we were visited by Rev. Dr. Alicia Forsey, who is Professor of Church History at the Starr King Divinity School in Berkeley, California, and a fully-fledged minister in the Unitarian Universalist Church in the U.S.A. On the Saturday night she asked me what the programme would be at church the next day, and I explained that there would be a normal service at 11 o’clock, followed by a baptism, after which we would repair to the Damer Hall for refreshments. Her eyes lit up at the mention of a baptism. ‘I’ve never been baptised,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could baptise me, too?’ At first I thought she was joking, but she explained that her parents were both Unitarians of the old school, and that baptism wasn’t a feature of their religious practice. But she had now reached a very important stage in her life and she would like to mark it with some kind of ceremony. However, she didn’t want to intrude on the c...

Everybody knows that Jesus was a carpenter. Car window stickers in America proclaim, ‘My boss is a Jewish carpenter’, and Woody Guthrie wrote a song in 1940, recorded more recently by Johnnie Cash, which makes much of Jesus’ humble trade: Jesus Christ was a man that travelled through this land A carpenter true and brave, Said to the rich, ‘Give your goods to the poor,’ So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave. Jesus Christ was a man, a carpenter by hand, A carpenter true and brave, And a dirty little coward called Judas Iscariot Laid Jesus Christ in his grave. Woody Guthrie said that he wrote the song while he was looking for somewhere to stay in New York City, because he wanted to put down on paper what he felt about rich folks and poor ones. Jesus was on the side of the poor, says Woody, and if he were alive today, preaching the same message, we would kill him: This song was written in New York City, Of rich man, preachers and slaves, Yes, if Jesus...