Religion: Geo-Theological Year?

Instead of following the parade of assorted groups demanding an end to atomic-weapons tests, the 250-member General Board, policymaking body of the Protestant National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., called upon the U.S. Government last week to launch an information program that would enable U.S. citizens to make up their own minds. “There is grave apprehension,” said a board statement, “that the Government has made decisions . . . without due regard for the necessity of public understanding.” In a nine-point program on the control of space and armaments, the board warned that “the risks of revealing secrets must be weighed boldly against the advantage of revealing truths. We hold that the fullest possible information is necessary for citizens to make moral judgments on crucial and complex issues …”

National Council President Edwin T. Dahlberg of St. Louis reported wide support for a “trial balloon” proposal he had launched in the council’s magazine for an interfaith “International Geo-Theological Year.” Just as the International Geophysical Year is studying the physical nature of the universe, said Dr. Dahlberg, an International Geo-Theological Year might study “the relation of the human soul to the cosmic order.” Scientists, philosophers and theologians of all faiths should be invited to exchange views on such questions as: C| “Do we live and move and have our being in God, or simply in a kind of electric plasma?”

<J “Is prayer a personal communion with a loving heavenly Father as Christ described it to be, or is it just a series of thought vibrations by which we correct the spiritual imbalance between man and his natural environment?” <J “What is the goal of human history? In the thunder of sound barriers breaking, the roar of rockets rushing through space . . . how shall we think of time, and timelessness, and eternity?”