Wrestling with Religion

 Pantheism is the theory that nothing exists outside of God or--in a logical if not intuitive equivalent--that no God exists outside the world. This includes a vast range of ideas, from (1) seeing the universe as thought in the mind of God to (2) seeing it as a mechanistic system of matter and energy that evokes reverence. The first is theistic idealism, the second science overlaid with awe--what Richard Dawkins mocks as "sexed up Atheism" ( The God Delusion , 2007, p. 40). Between these extremes, a cafeteria of flavors is outlined by Michael Levine in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ("Pantheism"). I recommend that article but will only consider a few flavors.  George Berkeley, an Irish bishop (1685-1753), uses his scientific theory of vision to argue that what we experience as the phenomenological world is merely a set of mental constructs, ideas existing solely in our minds. We construct a world of three-dimensional things from an amorphous field...

Five years ago, I was playing Sir Wilfrid Robarts (the Charles Laughton role) in the Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution and went directly from dress rehearsal to the Recreation Center, a downtown bar where I often played the open mic. I was still costumed as Sir Wilfrid--a dark suit, a blue bowtie, dark-rimmed glasses, a pocket handkerchief, and a buttonhole flower--dressed far more formally than I ever do as myself, along with a neatly cropped beard and hair.  Apparently, I clean up well. A young blonde, a stranger, asked me if I wanted to dance. I say young. She was the kind of fifty that passes for thirty in dim light--twenty years my junior, and I assume she was drawn to Sir Wilfrid's distinguished aura and would have ignored my open-collar norm. Her assertiveness was pleasant if at first suspicious, as if she might be a pro, but our conversation migrated out to the bench on the sidewalk, a quieter place where we talked (well, mostly she talked) an hour o...

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...

It's a mystery: why some people never lost faith, felt no religious disillusionment growing up but I did. A cloud of alienation hangs over fellow travelers like me, along with consternation that others are untroubled by the lack of convincing evidence for the Apostle's Creed and the absurdity (in the terms by which we judge the rest of life) of God becoming a man whose sacrifice two thousand years ago gave everlasting life. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs, and no double-blind experiments have replicated this or its ancient rationale: the power of blood sacrifice to purge guilt. Slaughtered animals were burned for gods or spirits all over traditional European and Asian religions, but nowhere in my Christian experience have there been any sacred barbecue grills, though that's exactly what the Lord's altar in the Temple was. The sacrifice of chickens in Voodoo and Jewish rites is attacked as animal cruelty, even as Purdue's mechanically offed...

Religion in the old South Growing up in an Alabama Protestant town and a Baptist family in the 20th century, I had a clear idea what religion was, but a limited one. Most local religion was austere or invisible in the frontier tradition, all about words and the "truths" they signified, scarcely existing outside of songs, prayers, sermons, books, and pamphlets. A "mixed" religious family was one where a husband and wife disagreed about which church to go to Sunday morning. There was a Catholic church--small but thriving in 1950 as university influence made Auburn vaguely cosmopolitan--but I've heard that the church was founded by mistake. Around 1910, when no establishment of religion meant promoting all Christian denominations equally, students were required to sign a log at the church of their choice every Sunday morning. Since there was no Catholic church in Auburn, if they registered as Catholic, they could sleep in, and the story is that thes...

March 17, 2020. Last week began almost normally with COVID-19 infections few and far away, single cases making news. "Best wash your hands and not shake hands, but no fear." Then, day by day over the week, the drumbeat crescendoed  to what feels like hysteria but makes precautionary sense, like wearing a seat belt even if you've driven for years without a crash. Here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, it's all precautionary. Because the virus incubates for days and spreads from people without symptoms, next week's precautions have to be made yesterday. And because nobody's immune, it spreads explosively under normal conditions, doubling every week until it infects most of the population. The mortality rate is modest, maybe one percent (we don't know because mild cases go unreported), but that's much more lethal than flu.  As I write, there's only one case in Spotsylvania County--one out of 134,000 people and that one quarantined--so...