By Lewis Willis
Just before the holidays last December, I got into “a reading mode.” I was about to do some flying, and I don’t “just sit” very well on an airplane. So, I read. I finished one book on the trip and started another. By then I was back home, but nothing on television interested me, so I kept buying books and reading them. Even sports did not attract my attention. (I guess I have tired of seeing the latest episode where a famous, wealthy athlete decides he can commit a crime and everyone will accept it because of who he is.) So, I have continued to read in my spare time.
I have frequently been amused by the comments and commentary of a CBS 60 Minutes contributor named Andy Rooney. Much of what he says has been enjoyable. Therefore, I was anxious to read his new book, Sincerely, Andy Rooney, which Joyce recently purchased for me. The book is a collection of letters he has written to friends and to people who have written to him, about newspaper and television pieces he has authored through the years. I enjoyed the book until I came to the next to last letter he wrote; a letter he had written in 1989 to his four children on the subject of God and religion.
Now, I want to be careful what I say here, so I shall not quote his copyrighted statements in the slim possibility he might accidentally see what I am about to write. Several of his letters in the book concerned things like this article written in response to his writings, in which he threatened lawsuits. I certainly don’t want to get sued!
Let me just list some of the things Rooney thinks about God and religion:
- He wonders who created God.
- He believes religion is so popular because people are afraid of things they don’t know.
- He attributes war and its violence to religion, more than to anything else.
- He thinks God is a cousin of Santa Claus.
- He thinks religion is a hoax, resting on myths aimed at proving something which is not true. (Unfortunately, he failed to tell his readers how he knew it was not true, but being as smart as he is, he just has to be right!)
- He ridicules the idea that the Ten Commandments were given to Moses at a location unknown to Rooney called Sinai. After this profound announcement, he proclaims himself as Romania’s Queen!
- He wrote of things that existed before religion came along.
- He is of the view that religion is a trick people play on themselves, which they should realize to be nothing but a trick.
- Rooney does not believe that rational people could possibly believe in religion. Needless to say, Rooney regards himself as rational, but you couldn’t prove it by me!
- He believes man evolved by adapting himself to the earth. Not surprisingly, he forgot to tell us how that happened.
- Rooney thinks the Bible account of Adam and Eve is a myth which died with the arrival of Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species. This sounded like rather wishful thinking to me, as in the fellow who whistles his way through the graveyard at night.
- He thinks he sees a retreat by theologians in the face of scientific proof that the earth is round instead of flat. I wonder where this fellow has been. I haven’t seen a need for retreat on this question, have you?
- Rooney told his children he thought the Bible, while a myth, has much good in it, though there are unexplained events and contradictions in it. Oh, thank you Mr. Rooney for telling us some of it is good! (By the way, who decreed that Rooney has to understand everything anyway?)
- He thinks Christ was a good man but that he had no relation to God. I suppose Rooney thinks he is the first to believe this. There were multitudes of unbelievers like him in the days of Jesus, just as there are today, who also will be in hell (John 8:24).
- He thinks people who believe the Bible to be God’s Word are not thinking. Of course, Rooney is a thinker. If you don’t believe so, just ask him.
- He thinks worship must be offered to God in the belief that God lacks security and responds to such flattery.
- Rooney believes God and the Loch Ness monster have a lot in common.
Then, if all this were not bad enough, Rooney had the audacity to sign his letter to his children with “love.” There is no evidence of love for his children that I can see in what he wrote. He has done all he can with his ridicule of the Bible to prevent their obedience to the Lord’s commands. Only by obedience will his beloved children be saved (Heb. 5:9). Please, Lord, deliver this man’s children from his perverted “love!”
Rooney doesn’t understand religion, so he doesn’t believe in it. Interestingly, in his last letter in the book, he writes about a voyage he took to celebrate the 50th anniversary of D-Day. He crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth II. He could not understand how something so big as that ship could float! Since Rooney does not believe in things he does not understand, I have to conclude he does not believe in ships!
If you think you might want to read this infidel’s diatribe, please don’t buy the book! Just rent it from me. I’m trying to recoup the loss of Joyce’s money!
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