This [What would Jesus drive? ad] to me is not evangelical, this to me is misnamed, is a misnomer. That What- would-Jesus-drive organization is not evangelical.

People with genuine faith in Christ, that Christ in his scriptures, his words, influences everything. We don’t compartmentalize our lives. A true Christian is not just a Sunday Christian or whatever you want to say. Certainly we would do that. This is extreme and to put Jesus in there is very disrespectful.

I think religion and faith informs how we live our lives in really, all aspects. At least we hope it does. I think, certainly, how I live in the environment, how I take care of it, how I fail to, it’s extremely relevant.

I see religion as being something that’s supposed to be something genuine, something sincere. Not just for this cause or that cause to be used in a way that furthers something other than goodness and faith. And so for me it’s extremely relevant. But when I saw the ad, I thought to myself, is this being used to further some agenda? Of course there’s some people who believe religion has its own agenda, but for me, if I define faith as trying to bring about good in the world and follow some of these general principles that we have, I think it matters what car I drive, I think it matters whether I recycle, I think it matters how I treat my children, I think it matters how I behave in a number of forms. But again, I find it a little disturbing because I’m not so sure there’s a clear-cut answer in the issue of global warming and if SUV’s affect that.

I think that every human being is religious to the core and this whole idea that somehow we have this little private warm fuzzy religious feeling or something, that’s a very helpful view if you’re trying to suppress religion in the public arena, but everybody is operating out of what motivates them the most. So if you believe that God is going to be found by science or that all of our problems in the world are going to be solved by a better technology, you’re just someone who happens to have deep faith in science or in technology or you happen to believe that there’s just good people everywhere and so your God happens to be demos, the people, and they’ll come with the right solutions if we just get enough votes. Everything will turn out better but everybody is operating out of what they believe is ultimately holding the truth and so culture is essentially the extension of your religion and action, is what comes out of your fingertips, and so it’s deeply religious everywhere you go.

I really feel that regardless of what religion you espouse or what faith, that if you’re thinking logically as a citizen of the earth you’re called upon to be a steward of our resources and our environment. And you talk about evidence. I grew up in Southern California, and I thought I knew everything about smog, and I remember being called in because the smog days were so bad. But yet now, when I go there and visit, I notice the environment has been cleaned up. It’s still bad, but it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be. But when I go abroad and visit Mexico City, where I can’t even breath, it’s 10 times worse than it was in Los Angeles, and I have friends that come back from China and report horrendous clouds of smog there. I’m beginning to wonder what’s this complex of manufacturing and these allegiances for economy are doing to our environment.

I think the [What would Jesus drive?] ad is really silly and it trivializes any religious faith. But with regards to SUV's - I got the book on SUV's for a Christmas present. I haven't read it yet but I read all the reviews around it and I'll get to it once I retire, but the things that I've read so far are very revealing about how the free market economy in the U.S. inverts all of our values.

The design of the [SUV's] grill, for example - it's designed to look ferocious and vicious: "Here I come and you get out of my way." Is that the sort of moral position that we need in the world? Those are deliberate designs to put people in and give them a false sense of security. These are very unsafe vehicles and we claim to be a religious nation and we allow our industries and our businesses - at the conference on religion at Idaho over the week I saw a series of ads using the Adam and Eve story to sell things - subvert our entire moral structure, but we support this. It's totally immoral. That's the reason why SUV's ought to be banned or people ought not to buy them, but I think we've got a sort of value structure here in our country that is expressed in many different ways.

If I go back in our religious tradition, biblically based, one of the key things that I find is “multiply and replenish the earth.” There back in the Old Testament, early on. And I puzzle over “multiply.” That’s not really hard to figure out. Religion has done that pretty well. “Replenish the earth” — I’m not really sure what that meant. To me it means, “think long term.” And I think specifically in our culture we think way short term.

I don’t think we consider beyond our grandkids, maybe beyond our great grandkids. We’re not thinking 15, 20 generations down the line and asking ourselves what happens if we export the way we live to all of the world? Is it appropriate? Do we make their lives better? Do we make their lives more complicated and cheaper by exporting what we export?

If you look at some of the rationale behind Al Qaida, if you believe the rationale they’re giving us, they think that what the U.S. exports is no good. And in large respect, I have to agree with that. I think pornography is no good, I think weapons are no good, I think that the automobile and commercialization in terms of material sense may not be any good. It probably beats some of the other things nations can be doing. But I question in the long run — can you make every country in the world like this? I think the answer is no. The resources aren’t there. So we’re kidding ourselves and we’re giving up our planning for the future to this commercialism we think is so great at the moment.

What’s scary is that we have one of the longest-term fuses of most nations in the world. As short as our attention span is, it is shorter elsewhere. And I would just simply give the example of having worked on USAID projects in Africa, where there’s simply no long-term thinking. And I think this does go back to my concern about the fundamental religious nature of various cultures where there is no planning for the next generation based on economic thoughts, political and social relations, their view of women in men’s roles and so on. But what happens in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where there is no planting of trees for the next generation. I mean you think of Brazil and other places where they’re consuming vast amounts of their resources and they become totally dependent. And I give one example, when there was a power shortage that we had in Kenya and the newspapers would consistently say, what foreign aid agency or country is going to help us with our problem. It was a complete culture of dependence. It was like a drug addict. They didn’t say, what are we going to do to fix this? It was, who’s going to bail us out this time? And it was so steep into the way of thinking that they were almost helpless in terms of being able to organize themselves to solve the problem. And so you would look at some of the townships in South Africa and there were no trees. Nothing green living anywhere. They had cut them all down for fuel. And no one could plant anything because their neighbor would cut it down and burn it too. So when you’re in that kind of environment where it’s just consume, consume, consume and not planning for the children, even your own, you’re in a world of hurt. And I think we don’t look far enough down the road here, but we’re certainly planting trees, we’re trying to look 10, 20, 30, 50 years down the road, to some extent. And I think again, that’s part of a fundamental religious orientation that says we are do care about the future of our children, we aren’t just looking out after number one.

In this topic I have to say I feel a very deep personal responsibility with how I am a consumer or what I’m doing in this economy and this culture and it is directly connected with my faith and how I feel my responsibility as a person of faith. I’m deeply troubled by a whole wide variety of things, from how my clothes are manufactured, how my food is grown and picked, and all of that kind of thing. It troubles me to see people, basically in a situation of oppression to put clothes on my back and my family’s back and to put food on my table. And how do I respond to that. You know, we talked about hopelessness or someone mentioned hopelessness in another discussion. Sometimes I feel a certain sense of hopelessness. How can I possibly have anything to do with this? How can I change something about these poor migrant farm workers and Pasco? Well, I have to say that I feel very strongly that I have to try to minimize my involvement. I garden. I have a dream in my life of somehow not having to buy fruit from a can. I shop at Albertsons. I love Albertsons. I’m very fond of the young man who bags the groceries there. He’s a dear person. I’m glad he has a job. But I would like to step back from that and see how I can step away from that. That’s the only way that I can see that I can be involved in somehow righting things.

I’m here to unite with your hearts. That’s the only thing that matters in the real world. It’s the spiritual education that we need to talk about, and we’re talking about material things. We’re talking about symptoms and we’re ignoring the basic reasons for that. The basic disease is disunity. The beautiful light has sent us many teachers, yet we get focused on one lamp. We remain with that one lamp, never going beyond. And I’m very grateful to be born at this time and to have all these technologies, because God has given us everything in and on earth for men, but yet we have a responsibility for that. So it’s been difficult for me to sit here and listen to political views because I’m asked to shun it; my faith asks me to shun it. But in the same sense I obey the law of the land to the exact letter, no anarchy. My faith has given me back Christianity, which I forsake. Because what the followers of Jesus Christ did to the indigenous people, not only here but all over the world. And our prayers say that if you deny one of these lives, you’ve denied them all. So no longer could I deny Jesus Christ and Christianity. Give it back to me. So we sit here and we know that we have to be stewardesses but what we need to do is we need to have a spiritual education. Light is light, no matter if it comes with Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohamed. It’s still light. The only thing that differs is the social teachings.

My son was in the Peace Corps and was in Honduras and they picked up street kids, off the street, and gave them a trade. And I just think if we could export more people in that area, and forget about trying to make them little Christians, because we don’t need to make the Muslims little Christians any more than I want the Muslims coming to me telling me that I need to change because they’ve got a better way. And I just think the attitude that Christians have so often is that we’re just a cut above all these others, it’s just very irritating to me. But another thing I have to say is I think that another problem with our country right now is just plain greed. I think when I see these offshore people who don’t pay taxes, when all of us sitting in this room are paying our little bit of piddle taxes. I think that greed is the biggest sin of all, maybe not the biggest one.

This [What would Jesus drive? ad] is nonsense. We’re talking about our desires and putting them on Jesus. Jesus would take public transportation. Or he would take a plane. Depends on what the purpose is.

Simple thinking and high thinking. That’s what we should be.

Economics has got nothing to do with God. God sustains the whole world without the dollars, without the dinars, without the rupees. To even talk about it shows our ignorance of God. Economics has got nothing to do with it. God is above all this material crass. We should be talking about how God sustains the whole world. The elephants in Africa. The Iranians, the Afghanistanis, the Americans. That’s what sustains us.

The religion has to play an important part in the way we are towards environment because God has created environment in its purest and cleanest form and it’s us, it’s the people who pollute it and that cannot be in the plans that God has planned for the environment to be polluted, because it’s a gift and it’s a trust and we are abusing this trust.

Can we live without the SUVs? Yes we can. Can we live without a lot of these high polluting engines? Yes we can. Do we have the technology to build things that go without gas? Yes we do. But why aren’t they out there. Because economics, it’s dollars. It boils down to the companies out there that are involved they are addicted to the oil. And that’s where we have all the problems.

I think it’s people who are addicted to oil. I think it’s our vanity in some sense. That’s part of our nature. I’m not saying that’s good. I’m saying that’s reality. Why did a chieftain need 12 camels instead of just one? It’s a part of our vanity.

It’s technology that is based upon this oil right now. That’s where we are. We need to move beyond that, but that takes time.

We would never do a commercial [What would Jesus drive?] like that—hey, Unitarians defend the environment and you should too.

I’m appalled by seeing the waste. You go look at, not that I have looked, but I have worked at fast food restaurants and I know that a lot of food is dumped every night instead of giving to the employees or to a homeless shelter or to places where people could eat it actually, it’s dumped. Because, for whatever reason. You go into developing nations and people go through garbage to find food. And somebody has asked me this question, “Why do they hate us outside?” One of the reasons why people detest us is because they think we’re too arrogant. And as people of faith, we need to be humble. And what would Jesus do is a good question for us to ask, or what would Mohammad do?

I think that the religions are blatantly failing in regard to the environment, in regard to the real crisis that we have in regard to diseases.

We have two million people in prisons. We don’t have a universal health care system. We’re far from it. We have people falling through the cracks all over. Here in Idaho we have children who are not immunized. And I don’t believe that any of the major religions are doing anything besides fighting amongst themselves, looking to make sure that their own soul is saved. We’re just not doing what should be done. The religions are just . . . every fundamentalist here should just be appalled at what’s happening because they’re not fundamentally taking care of the world. Which is all one.

I think that our priorities are wrong. Vern has pointed out what I think is really important and what most of us really feel that we should be looking at first, like health care for all of us. Education for all of us. When we have taken care of those things, then I think we should start looking at what the rest of the world is doing.

We too look at in my church at these things on an individual basis. Once a month I get my 89 Nissan pickup truck down to the church and we fill it with trash. And we take it to the recycling center. We sell it and we save that money. And we participate in the heifer project. And we have bought a goat. And now we’re halfway towards a llama. We haven’t gotten around to buying a yak yet, but that’s a possibility.

People see the way that we live and we live like no other country in the world and then our television commercials, our programs, our movies then portray this and everybody else wants a piece of the action. They also want to live like we do. Well we know that that is a death knell for the earth.

I think we can giggle at an ad like this [What would Jesus drive?] and think is just kind of an absurd concept, “What would Jesus drive?” But I think maybe we, those of us from the Christian heritage consider the choices that Jesus would make too little.

You know I think tonight we’ve talked about reality and what it might offer as our first option in things, and I think a lot of the teachings of Christ is how we live in relationship to each other, and how we take care of our creation. Jesus talked a lot about taking nothing for the journey. And giving up your life so that you can have your life.

So I think that on all these political and environmental and global problems, for people of faith to ask the question, What would Jesus do about AIDS and Medicare and the elevation of women, and how would Jesus draft the national budget? And when we have four hundred billion going to the military, in my mind that doesn’t go with Jesus’ teaching of, Feed my sheep. If we had even 100 billion of that, 200 billion of that for sheep feeding, I imagine, I could envision a huge difference.

I think that that is one of the problems, is that there is no vision. We are so wrapped up in living our lives day to day and we are so busy, and we don’t take time to have a vision of what it could be if we actually lived out our faith, lived out our convictions, asked questions instead of following.

Instead of giving over all of our decision-making to someone else, to actually make a decision in your life. To know I’m not going to put up with this anymore, I’m going to do it different. I’m not going to follow, I might not lead, but I’m not going to follow. And look for the truth in the situations where it happens and be a good steward of what God has given us.

I went to the Amazons a few years ago, and it was incredible to me to see creation as, you know, you kind of envision it in the Bible, you know God created the trees and everything. I mean that’s all there was, was all this creation around you, and you realize as you saw the tiny little ants and the great big trees and if you pulled one little section out of that ecosystem that was so incredibly invented by God, and if you pulled one little section out, the entire thing is going to tumble. And so you have to be very very careful with every little part of it.

And I think we focus so much on getting what we want that we forget about what we actually need.

I think the Bible teaches us also that after Jesus conducted the miracle of feeding the 5,000 he asks the disciples to collect what was left over. And that tells us that waste, as society handles it now, is not a godly concept. So really being conservative and being not wasteful and respect all our resources.

But I want to mention another thing here, and that’s not necessarily faith-related as from the technical background I have, that we produce a good percentage of the world’s food. And we are blessed by the ability to do that. And therefore if we are consuming energy more than other country we should take that into consideration. So we just can’t say that we conserve without knowing, without conserving what we produce. Because that’s not fair either. So just avoid the waste.

The other thing that I want to mention here is the fact that as a Christian your confidence is not coming from the materials things around you.

You really have the internal support that you have and therefore you do not need all the luxurious materials, wasteful things to make you distinguished.

Because you really have the confidence that you’re distinguished as an aid of God and therefore you do not need a lot of those things that are just waste, that are just there for appearance but not for reality.

You know in the Old Testament, there is a passage that says, “God sets before man life and death, therefore choose life.” I once had the opportunity to see in a scanning electron microscope a leaf in the process of conducting photosynthesis. That’s the essence of life. Photosynthesis is the basis for our food chain.

So when you see life, then it affects the way you make choices. Now the problem is our society puts a lot of stumbling blocks in front of us, and if I have to choose for lunch between a salad bar and a cheeseburger and I’ve got 30 minutes and I can’t get across town to the one salad bar that I wanted to deal then I’m going to have a cheeseburger. And so we really do have to look at these barriers and see how we’re going to have fewer cheeseburgers and more salad bars.

I guess I would say that, Cher said very well, to be good stewards. I think we need to do that. Certainly starting with ourselves and our lives and how we conduct ourselves and what God has given to us to make sure we used those things wisely, whether they’re the talents and abilities he’s given us, or the material blessings that we have. Certainly in America we have tremendous material blessings.

I think also from a Christian perspective is coming back and looking at some of the environmental concerns and they’re valid.

We need to remember, one, this is God’s creation. There’s a tendency among certain people to place creation above the Creator. And I think we’re upside down that way as a nation at times. So bring it back into perspective. Being good stewards of our own life and being good stewards of the creation that God has entrusted to us. I think part of that is using the creation but using it wisely and responsibly.

Mohammed is attributed in the Hadith with saying, “Not one of you is a true believer until he desires for his neighbor what he desires for himself.” And I think that until we can have the same anxiety over the welfare of others than we hold for ourselves that we’re going to fall short of helping other people. I think this is another ego breaker.

And I think that same anxiety within my own religious tradition is stated as “We as human should be anxiously engaged in a good cause and bring to pass much righteousness for the power is in us.” And so this is a test of our faith. All of this to me is a test to our faith.

Do we really believe what we claim to believe and are we willing to lay it on God’s altar of sacrifice, knowing that it may not seem realistic? Just as laying Isaac on the altar. I don’t see how that can possibly seem realistic. He was to be the father of many nations, the child of promise. And before he reached puberty and could be the father of many nations he was to be killed. An act of faith that goes against our reason. And I think that as stewards we have to take that step. Also we have to be accountable to ourselves and desire to be honest and forth right in what we do.

Along that line in Buddhism, there are two terms to this. First one is “Esho Funi,” which literally means the inseparability of man and his environment. As such, as stewards of this ship that we are on in the planetary system, we are each ecosystems in and of ourselves. And Buddhism teaches that, that it is all interconnected.

The other term that I wanted to share is “Renge,” and that is cause and effect. What we do comes back in an effect, positive or negative; some people refer to that as karma.

The positive or negative effect of taking care of our planet, I think we see everyday. And as you’re saying, as stewards of this planet, we really need to look within to see exactly what we need to survive.

I recently sold my SUV, by the way. (laughter)

We are a country that is rich in many, many ways. But being stored, we have to recognize that individually we can do so much, but collectively we can do a whole bunch. And this is where I think, we fall short.

If you look around and see how many people who live in poverty. We are so rich; we have so many resources, you know, you name it. But there are so few who can fully enjoy the fruits of what this country really has. And there are so many other people who are… they live in poverty. They can’t even get the medication that they want. They can’t get the clothing, the food, you know.

When I see people who have to make a decision between, Do I buy medicine this month or do I buy food? You know. This is horrible for a country that is so prosperous. But you see we don’t look at it in terms of . . . we talk about being a steward; we talk about this as a Christian nation. And in certain things we do, yes. But in the areas where it really counts to look out for each other, we don’t do that.

We will send billions of dollars overseas and God only knows where that money really goes. Who gets it. But here in this country, I’m talking about here in this country we have a whole bunch of people who really need the help, on a daily basis are starving. Kids that never get their booster shots. They haven’t got clothing. They haven’t got breakfast to go to school in the morning. Our kids go to sleep at night, they’re hungry. Or they haven’t got a decent place to live.

You know if you just stop and take a look around yourself, I mean it’s nice to be able to say, I have an SUV, I have this, I have that, I have an 800,000 dollar house. But how many other individuals are around you who don’t have anything?

We just have to search our hearts and our minds, and I’m saying do it collectively, not as an individual, because as an individual we’re limited to what we can do, but collectively we can do a whole bunch.

I think it starts with personal conviction. Your personal conviction leads you to obviously do the right thing. AJ was saying collectively. Even though it is collectively, it starts with . . . There’s a saying that I have, “Each one teach one.” Each person has to take the responsibility. And she sold her SUV . . . and not to minimize what you did but who did you sell it to because somebody else is still driving it? (laughter) And so you know, for example when I first began to live my life according to the scriptures, to the Bible, I looked at the sacrifice that Christ Jesus made. The sacrifice meaning dying on the cross, and the empowerment being raised on the third day according to what the scriptures teaches us. That’s the same concept that I want to have in every day life. Trying to bring back to reality.

I had a bunch of CD’s that most of you probably never even heard of, if I mentioned some of the names. Although I think I’ve seen some of you in traffic you know . . .

I took these CD’s and my first thought was to sell them, but I said, If I sell them, some other young person is going to listen to them. So I decided to break them. I got a lot of slack from friends you know, you could’ve sold that and made a lot of money. But I wanted to get rid of them because I took the responsibility myself to say, hey it stops here, and so according to one’s faith, so be it.

I have a very hard time with the administration’s stand on the Kyoto treaty. It’s so disheartening to me to think of all the work that went into it. All the previous administrations, not just the Democratic, but previous administrations for all those years went into all that work and then this administration just dumped it. And it is because it didn’t fit into what they wanted to do. Another unilateral decision made by an administration that is not a good steward and I feel very strongly that if he’s going to profess this great Christianity that he’s got that he ought to be living it out a little more convincingly in the world view. Because to tell you the truth I think he’s giving a lot of us a bad name. I just feel very strongly that… I mean, he might be a Christian, I may be a Christian, but it’s certainly not the same Christianity that we see which is luckily why we live in America.

I just think that it is so irresponsible of this nation who uses more resources than any other nation in the world, to say to the rest of the world, Go ahead and be very conservative and conserve all your energy so we can use it. Thanks a lot. I find that very, very hard to swallow.

I’m having a hard time with this because I think the Kyoto agreements were flawed. And I agree with all that’s been said about been a good steward and all of those things too, but we need to look at the practical thing of what those treaties are. The countries that were really causing the pollution that were exempted.

And I get a little tired of big business being dumped on. I think they have done more to elevate and help people around the world. I’m a great believer in capitalism. I think that this country, and even though we are large consumers, we’ve done much to elevate the whole world. So I don’t think we need to apologize. I think we need to look at the realities of that. I’m glad for the administration who stood up to it under a lot of pressure not to.

When I think about the experiences that I’ve had in life that I would call spiritual, a lot of them have been in nature, watching a sunset, or watching birds fly, or a lot of things that have happened out in the wilderness. And so to not protect that and not subscribe to agreements that protect our environment, whether it is here or across the world, I think would be, like Cher said, irresponsible. So I think we have to be responsible and protect things like that.

One of the aspects of the Kyoto accords I think that we could talk about, even apart from the environment, are land mines. Now land mines are not weapons of mass destruction but they’re weapons of indiscriminate destruction.

And when the move was made toward war with Iraq, I remember reading that Donald Rumsfeld said, no weapon would be withheld as a potential weapon, and he said specifically land mines.

Now with the overwhelming force of the United States I just can’t see why we cannot say, apart from the environmental agreement, or whatever disagreements we had about that, why we can’t say land mines should not be used. Especially given the fact that children overwhelmingly, hundreds of thousands of children, find the tens of millions of land mines that have been left by the superpowers and the great powers of this world.

I think that that is a travesty and I would’ve like to see whether, I don’t care if it’s a Republican or a Democratic administration or independent or anything else, get up and say, we will draw a moral line here. They’re not mass destruction but they are indiscriminate and we will not cross that line.

I go back to the Kyoto accords. I’m not well versed in the specifics of it. I do know that some of the criticism was based upon some of the inequalities of who’s going to do what or who’s going to be favored to do certain things, whatever.

From a Christian perspective and I would come back to our discussion of being good stewards, certainly we need to take care of the creation that God has blessed us with. Part of that taking care of is to use the resources that are part of it in a responsible way, whether it is oil, coal and other things. I believe that those are provided for our use. The byproducts of those things are identified as being problematic in our environment.

Certainly in the United States we have ample regulatory requirements imposed on various industries to minimize the amount the pollution and damage to water, air, and so on, and so on.

So I think as a nation and from a Christian perspective we are making strides. I don’t think that we should hamstring ourselves. I do think we ought to seriously look at what else can be done but I also don’t think that we should deliberately hamstring ourselves so that other nations can use things in ways that might be irresponsible and may cause more harm to the environment. So I think it’s an issue of fairness and being responsible and I think that that’s consistent with being good stewards.

We keep talking about us and them, you know. We’re on this planet where we’re all human beings. They’re all our brothers and sisters, you know. So it’s selfish. To me it seems selfish of us to live like we’re living and let over 20% of the people in the world exist on less than a dollar a day. I think that we need to do something.

The one place that I see some hope, is these non-governmental organizations that are working around the world, kind of grassroots movements. They had a conference in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 1992, and out of that came the Earth Charter.