Wrestling with Religion

The God of orthodox theology has signified since Augustine a transcendently empty signifier--not another being, but Being, even if personally accessible. He is ultimately inherently incomprehensible. The God-idea, transcending human understanding, is definable in terms of what He is not, such as weak, local, divided, or ignorant. So what does it mean to negate an incomprehensible negation?       Theologians allow God to be imagined in analogical terms, in metaphors and other figures. It was settled in the early centuries of Christian theology that the Father exists beyond limits of time and space, so anthropomorphic language—such as His walking in the Garden, becoming angry, sitting on a throne, taking pity, smelling sacrifices, or having gender—must all be analogical, referring to eternal, changeless traits such as absolute justice and power. The term God signs a signifier transcending all human confirmation or denial, a belief that insulates itself from all id...

John Milton is best known for Paradise Lost , written late in life, but his earlier fame was as a writer of political tracts, particularly the Areopagitica. This classic defense of the free press is so enduring that it has been cited by the US Supreme Court. Milton addresses Parliament and calls for the repeal of the Licensing Act of 1643, which required a government license before a book could be published--a practice that US law prohibits as “prior restraint.”       Milton argues for a  marketplace of ideas in which the “dust and cinders” of error “serve to polish and brighten the armory of truth” and so should not be discarded. “Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensing to make her victorious. Those are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power.” In his view, only those who doubt their own beliefs will attack opposing beliefs by any means other than counter-argument. To use brute for...

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. ...

Judge Paul Toomer, 1902 Above Columbus and Girard, above the City Mill dam, the Alabama bank of the Chattahoochee steepens while the Georgia side sprawls flat and prone to flooding. On the Alabama ridges lounges the community of Summerville, where I live year round and well-off Columbusites lodge their families during the malaria season.  The trail that plaits along the riverbank below my farm, around boulder and tree trunk, once led up to the footbridge to Clapp's Factory three miles north of town. Now the bridge is gone, the factory in ruins, but industry still thrives in Columbus, plenty jobs for workers who during Reconstruction were recruited from as far away as Manchester, England, where agents offered millhands and their families free passage to Georgia. No longer a road to work, the trail remains a natural park, unspoiled since Indian days. The steep bank prohibits agriculture, and on summer Sundays couples stroll here as if it were Central Park....

 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...