At Least the Renegade Has an Open Mind

Re “The Renegade Reverend” (Dec. 11): The various critics of Rev. Matthew Fox and his “creative spirituality” concepts who cannot accept his idea that all living things contain a spark of the divine, is symptomatic of the shortsighted arrogance of almost all Western World religious sects.

Their general insistence that we human creatures are the only creatures with a “soul” (whatever that is) and that everything in the universe is just there for the use and convenience of humans by the will of an entity called God, is truly egotistical and limiting.

Some religions are even more self-centered and claim that their dogmas are the only true beliefs and all others are false.

The openness and all-inclusiveness of Fox’s ideas sound to me much more like what a person like Christ might have agreed with than do the narrow and spiritually constipated views of most establishment religions.

In the last analysis the whole controversy becomes moot. Such a great pompous to-do over an ancient mixture of myth, legend, faith, superstition and wishful thinking, plus a lot of bits and pieces of dubious history, of which religions of all sorts seem to consist, rather boggles the mind.

WALT HOPMANS

Santa Barbara