Wrestling with Religion

In The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1997), Carl Sagan imagines that he has offered to show me a fire-breathing dragon in his garage, and, when I get there, I see only "a ladder, empty paint cans, and an old tricycle." He'd neglected, it seems, to mention that the dragon is invisible. This thought experiment imagines my proposing a series of ways to detect the dragon. They are good ideas, he imagines replying, but unfortunately won't work. Flour on the floor won't because dragons levitate, infrared won't because dragon fire is heatless, and spray paint won't because dragons are incorporeal. If Sagan insists on countering every test I propose with an evasive redefinition, it's clearly silly for him to then shift the burden of proof onto me and suggest that, since I can't prove the dragon is absent, it may very well be present. There's no practical difference between an undetectable dragon and no dragon at all. ...

Why was Christianity so transparently bogus--or, at least, without substance--to me as a young adult--and to some of my intelligent, well-read friends but not to others ? It's easy to say that people believe whatever makes them feel good, to dismiss faith as mindless conformity and intellectual shoddiness.  As social media makes clear, people often read a sentence as meaning how they feel when they read it, not as what the grammar and definitions factually add up to. The mainstream media make everything into a crisis , a friend wrote yesterday. Everything ? I missed CNN coverage of my afternoon nap. OK, my forty years as a comp teacher are showing. Climbing off my pedagogical high horse, I'll note that two kinds of reading, his and mine, yield two distinct meanings, one absurd and the other reasonable. One is nonsensical, the other merely a hyperbole--a figure of speech. Seeming credulity may be this kind of difference: reading religious language, not as word-for-word m...