Religion

The most important relationship in a human being's life is his relationship with God through Jesus Christ. We hear people speak of religion, the road to Hell is paved with religion. In my travels through 157 countries I have witnessed the peculiar religions of many persons on this earth. Perhaps none as Godless and irrational as those found in India among the Hindus. These temples which I visited in 1980 are located in India. These temples, the most pornographic sculptures on earth were constructed around 1050 A.D. Khajuraho religion is based on the emphasis and importance of not injuring any living beings. India abounds in Jain temples. Art flows freely in Jain temples, which are known for their intricacy and décor. Dedicated to Lord Mahavira- the founder of Jain, these temples also have idols of Hindu deities in them. The thing you notice first of the devotees of these temples is that they are all covered with netting because they are so careful not kill any living thing they are so afraid they will swallow a gnat.


82% of over the 1 billion people are Hindu. Islam is 12% but when the divisions was made with Pakistan, Pakistan became an Islamic nation. After centuries of Christian missionaries, including a friend of my mother, Laura Bell Bernard, There are still only 2.5% Christians. The 3 predominant Hindu Gods are Brahma, Shiva and Krishna. There are many thousands of minor Hindu gods. Mark Twain said once, “India is the ultimate travel destination”. There is no doubt in my mind that there is the religious center of the world if one is just looking for religion. But as a much greater writer than this one said long ago, “The road to hell is paved with religion”, and in India every breath of life revolves around religion.

The most obvious religious characteristic that the outsider notices in the beginning is the “sacred cow”. There is the same penalty in India for hitting cow as for hitting a fellow human being. It is a mystery to the western mind that in a nation of over 1 billion people, many of them starving, that “sacred cows” walk around and eat everything that is growing. I have seen a “sacred cow” walk into a decent restaurant and wreck the place. On one of my early morning walks, and I also try to see the activity of the market, I saw one peasant woman trying to make a little money selling her butter beans, clean and spread out on a towel. A “sacred cow” came up and defecated on her beans and of course she could do nothing about it. Such is the depravity of Indian religion.Perhaps the best known of the Hindu religion is that of the Sikhs, founded in 1500.

Its centerpiece is its gold temple located in Armistar in the Punjab province. The Sikhs are readily recognized because they wear the large turbins, wear a certain type underwear, always a certain dagger and bracelet. The gold temple is located in the middle of a lake and my guide arranged for me to tour the temple as well as the surrounding buildings where large quantities of food, mostly legumes, being prepared for the large number of Hindu’s who visit there daily. I have visited Armistar twice, a very remote area of India, with few conveniences. My hotel room had a fireplace where a house boy kept a fire going and water for bathing had to be heated and brought to the room.


I have visited Kashmir which is still a land of dispute between India and Pakistan and where the same type of primitive livings exist. It seems that the entire lifestyle and relationship of the Hindu/India nation revolves around their relationship to their many gods. In Burma, Bhutan and Seiken as well as Tibet, I encountered the most classic Buddhism. Buddhism is based on the teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as "The Buddha" (the Awakened One), who lived in the northeastern region of the Indian subcontinent and likely died around 400 BC. Bhutan was the last of Himalayan kingdoms to admit tourists. I was admitted by invitation of the king. A large percentage of Bhutan males become monks. This beautiful mountainous paradise, like Seiken and Tibet, is punctuated by monasteries and young males up to very old males live together as monks. Buddhism has spread across the 5,000 islands of Indonesia and other Asian countries including South Korea.

In South Korea, where my son (Dr John Morris and his wife Grace) were southern Baptist missionaries for many years and where my only two grandsons were reared. Christianity now encompasses about 23% of the population and Buddhism only 2%. Libraries of books have been written on the religions of the world and I am making no attempt to explain all of them.


In visiting the Yucatan, many of the 40 Muslim countries, particularly Turkey and my fascination of the mosque of St Sophia and the Blue mosque, I become more convinced than ever that as a Christian, a committed, born-again believer in Jesus Christ that one’s faith is a relationship. To the Christian, the relationship is with Jesus Christ, not a building, not a carved figure, but a belief system. “Faith is action”, based on belief, sustained by confidence. The Christian has confidence in the authority of God’s holy word which is totally different from any other “so called” religious writings of the Koran or the various Asian writers. We do what we do because we believe what we believe. The true Christian believes in the saving grace of Jesus Christ, through faith and nothing else. Most of these religions found in India, some even in China or Africa, like Abraham’s father Terah are just worshipers of idols. I’m sorry to report to you (and you know the difference between profession and possession or walkers and talkers) many of today’s so called Christians spend much time with their idol, the television set, which affords them every degrading sinful pleasure that Satan has ever materialized for the sighted person.

Padded Pews

On my second trip to China in 1980, I visited the famous Mogao Caves (a system of 492 temples in which thousands of Buddhist statues are located) where statue of Buddha and other Buddhist art is located. It is a treasury of Buddhist history and one of the many phenomenal aspects of Chinese life as affected by art and religion. The thing I remember most about the visit, four Chinese men walked up to me and said in English, “Are you a Christian? We are Christian.” This was the last question I ever expected to hear in a godless, communist country, by men dressed in the usual Mao uniforms and who looked no different than the zillions of Chinese men and women everywhere. I said, “Yes, praise God. I am thankful you are able to recognize a fellow Christian. I wished there were some way I could express to you how much God loves you and how much the Christians in the world are praying for you.”

Knowing the prying ears of government agents, including my guide, I made their photograph, shook their hands, gave each of them my card and retreated. The first words out of my guides mouth were, “What did those men say to you?” I said, “They were anxious to practice their English. I told them how much I was enjoying the caves.” The Chinese Christian church is growing because, like the early Christian church started in Antioch. Life is not easy for the Christian there, they are suffering persecution, but always, under persecution, the church grows. I understand that in spite of the starvation and degradation of the people in North Korea, the Christian church is growing even though 100,000 Christians are in prison. If you can imagine the absolute depravity of existence outside prison, can you even imagine life inside a communist North Korean prison.

My son, my only child, (Dr. John M. Morris) after all his years of education, microbiology, medicine, theology, (2 doctorates) spent many years, along with his wife and children, on the mission field in South Korea. He said, “The new Christians are so sincere in their faith that even in sickness, they believe in the power of prayer which comes even before the doctor.” The most sickening matter of 21st century liberal Christian thought in this country at present, is that even in a case of counseling, the modernist pastor will send a Christian church member to a godless psychologist for help.

Other than visiting homes of many ambassadors in world travel, I always tried to visit missions and churches because like healthcare, soul care is the interest of my life. I was embarrassed before the holy spirit of almighty God to witness the simplicity of faith in impossible situations with mission churches around the world. (They do not have padded pews)

In the Cameroon’s, I attended a worship service under a large “brush arbor” with crude benches and many worshipers just sitting on the ground. They would spend much time in prayer with their knees and heads on the ground pleading for God’s mercy and thanking God for their blessings. There were no musical instruments just timing type drums to which they would sing with great gusto. Their worship did not include any of the voodoo type activity I had witnessed in voodoo festivals much of which had extended to the catholic services. These people had been taught the difference in true worship than just pretending with God on padded pews. It is not my purpose here to describe the mosque found in Muslim countries, the Zongs and temples of the Buddhist and Hindu religions or even the state sponsored religious houses found in secular countries such as Scandinavia.

You find about as much passion and faith in a state sponsored secular worship activity as you do in an American civic club or TV pseudo entertainment mockery. (Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggart, Robert Schuller, etc) I define faith as a verb, action based on belief, sustained by confidence. There are many definitions of faith in God’s inerrant word. I understand the word faith is defined as the safety under the wing of a mother bird or in the cleft of a large rock. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) We are saved by grace through faith and nothing more.

A blind person depends on faith much more then a sighted person. We truly walk by faith not sight and, I HAD RATHER WALK IN DARKNESS IN MY BLINDNESS WITH GOD THAN TO WALK IN DAYLIGHT WITH GOOD EYES ALONE.

We exercise our faith in other things everyday. We put a letter with a stamp on it addressed to a certain place with faith believing it will get there. We buy a can of food at the grocery store with faith believing the can is correctly labeled. We put a pill from a bottle into our throat with faith believing that some half drunk or drugged pharmacist did not mix up the pills with ones of poison. We could give thousands of examples of using faith everyday in our daily activities, starting the car, or turning on a light switch.

The tragedy is that too few young people have experienced farm life where expensive seeds and fertilizer are put in the ground and we have the faith to believe that God in his omnipotent mercy will send the rain and sunshine essential for plant growth. It is too bad that young people cannot see the incubation of eggs, the hatching of small chicks with the innate knowledge of how to drink water. Or hear the definite sound of a mother hen different from any other hen. The sheep recognizes their own shepherds voice.

“For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.” (Job 14:7) The trials of life is such that most would not want to continue without hope. For the Christian, our hope is in our salvation and the many promises and prophecies of God’s word that until this very minute have been fulfilled and He has never forgotten. In knowing this, the disabled, the disenfranchised, the depressed and the despondent keep going with the “blessed assurance” that God will “never leave us or forsake us”. We are told that without vision the people perish, without hope, those with vision or without vision cannot long survive. Hope is found in encouragement and accomplishment. Why else would anyone strive to do better? We live with the blessed hope of our eternal salvation, enduring, life’s problems and disappointments.

God is love and our one commandment is to love one another. (John 13:34) Even if I were not sure and assured by the omnipotence, omniscience, and inerrancy of God’s infallible word, I would have to be convinced of God’s love and faithfulness by one great story in the Bible.

Abraham, the first Jew, perhaps one of the wealthiest men in the world, was living in Ur of the Chaldeas, was instructed by God to leave to an uncertain place, six hundred miles north. His father Terah, a worshiper of idols, died on the trip, near Damascus. But, in a long story of faith and promises, women and sons, he was instructed to offer his son of promise, Isaac, as a sacrifice. In a marvelous story, a type of Christ before Christ, the son of promise, about the same age as Christ when he was crucified, carried the wood for the fire on his back, up on the mountain, and Abraham, in complete obedience, just before killing his son in the sacrifice, was told by God not to kill his son, but rather a lamb. One of the most remarkable things about this story, a father knowing he would sacrifice his long awaited son of promise, they arose early in the morning.

All this happening 4,000 years before the sacrifice of God’s only Son, who likewise carried wood on his back, was killed to redeem both you and me. God showed once and for all with the rending of the veil of the temple, top to bottom, that the supreme act of love had been demonstrated for eternity. Sad to say, from then until now, people are still partial to thieves. Today, more than ever, Barabbas, the thief, would still be selected. “And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13) Christianity has become so comfortable, padded pews, drama and drums, bells and smells. If Christians lived their faith before the world, the world would be changed. Instead, in the comfort zone of wanting to be accepted by the world, the world has changed and converted the church.