Wrestling with Religion

Self-referential language self-destructs in what is called the Liar's Paradox. "I always lie," is true only if it is false, false if it is true.  Then there's a paradox from theology: "Can God make a stone so heavy he cannot lift it?" If God is all-powerful, then he isn't.              Scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas decided that omnipotence must be limited by logic--God can't contradict God--but in that case logic limits God as surely as the immovable rock. Of course, we can imagine an omnipotent God creating logic and then submitting voluntarily to his own creation, but it seems equally plausible that logic is an artifact of language. Absolute omnipotence could then simultaneously create an immovable rock and move it. Plato, who was obsessed with universals, wrote in his Republic, “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” I could elaborate this by suggesting that there are two ways I can be sure I ...

  Years ago, I posted on Facebook this meme from Cynthia Nixon, who married a woman in 2012: When women got the vote, they did not redefine voting. When African-Americans got the right to sit at a lunch counter alongside white people, they did not redefine eating out. They were simply invited to the table. That is all we want to do; we have no desire to change marriage. We want to be entitled to not only the same privileges but the same responsibilities as straight people.           This constructs same-sex marriage as another step in American's march toward freedom and justice for all, the familiar story of a minority denied fair treatment. Constructed this way, resisting same-sex marriage is like supporting slavery or segregation. It's a gender-based equivalent of racism. If, as a heterosexual, I want to sit at the marriage lunch counter but keep homosexuals away, I'm asking for special privileges. As marriage is legally defined, this makes a perfect se...

My wife did research at the Folger Library and stayed with a friend in DC in the early 1980s. I left the kids with their grandparents and visited her for a few days in a townhouse down the block from a tall-stacked crematorium. This poem was published in the journal Lips, 1986. Under the Crematorium On Capitol Hill, where one mower, communal, suffices a block of row houses, earth is remote under paving, the dead are ready to give their bodies to the air, white smoke out of the stack across the street from where I slept with my wife after weeks apart. If the funeral home's volcanic pillar, towered, unlike mine, quiescent, then she hinted of past eruptions gentle as baking bread, a haze like the heavening of uncaged soul in flavors of pot roast, bone, and dung-- and at least a block around, a dust sifting heavy with grease, clinging to windshields, glasses, lungs. Here the people (who breathe people) walk through the rhythms of that stack. The...

           The line between monotheistic and polytheistic religions is fuzzy at best. Islam and Judaism claim monotheism but employ angels--immortal, invisible beings with supernatural powers, identical in form and function to the pagan gods. The distinction between Gabriel bringing a message from Allah and Hermes bringing a message from Zeus is not obvious. And Christianity supports a throng of angels, devils, saints, and trinitarian persons rivaling the Greek pantheon. Monotheism is identified, not by the number of gods in the ancient sense, but by subordination of them all--even the loose cannons called demons--to a supreme God. But that description also applies to many polytheistic religions.           Cultures as diverse as Hindu in India, Algonquian in the United States, and Igbo in Nigeria recognize a single source of Being or Great Spirit--called Brahman, Manitou, and Chukwu--but emphasize that Being is genderless and ...