Wrestling with Religion

  James L. Kugel describes two distinct concepts of God in the Bible (pp. 107-118). The early Hebrew God is a tribal deity, proudly superior to Ba'al but still a face in a polytheistic crowd, possibly paired with a goddess. He wasn't the sole god but merely the god that his chosen tribe was obliged to worship no others "before" (Exodus 20:5). Like Athena, Apollo, and Santa Claus, he is supernatural but corporeal, a gendered person with hands and feet, a front and a back, located in time and and space. In Genesis 2-3, after creating the world, Yahweh breathes, speaks, walks with audible footsteps, and can't see Adam and Eve when they hide.  The same corporeal deity, appears on Mount Sinai--a particular place at a specific time, refuting his omnipresence--and tells Moses, “When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by.   Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be s...

            Road rage seems almost like demonic evil--destruction inflicted for no practical advantage--the motive being to hurt a stranger even at risk of hurting oneself. It's lose-lose. No sane driver who calculates long-term outcomes can see road rage as a wise policy, even in the crassest economic (or prison) terms.           Death threats to strangers on social media are another form of nonsensical evil, intended to hurt strangers without clear benefit to the sender. The outcome is simply an increase of fear and discomfort in the world without any balancing improvement.           Whatever event prompted the death threat has already happened. Here is gratuitous moral evil--the antithesis of the Golden Rule--actions intended to inflict pain on others for one's own inverted pleasure.  It seems that only joy in destruction could motivate unprofitable evil. It smacks of Original Sin and contradicts the...

  The world seems vivid around us like Cinemax, but it is only clear in an area about the size of a postage stamp at arm's length. Our 20/20, full-color vision comes from a pit that comprises less than one percent of the retina but uses over 50% of the visual cortex. Everything else is, to varying degrees, a grayish blur. Stare at a word on the far left side of this screen and, holding that tight focus, try to read a word a few inches to its right. You can't. The impulse will be to "look," to shift your focus right, but, if you do, the word to the left will blur.             We experience a photograph-like world around us because our eyes are constantly moving, stitching together postage-stamp snapshots to form panoramas (plus our quickness to focus on whatever interests us). Our visual world is a montage, a construct of remembered fragments constructing a narrow space that ends with the walls of a room, a street, a row of trees, and the like. The pas...

  Only a deposed king, Blaise Pascal noted, is distressed not to be a king. Most of us are satisfied by lesser honors. It's all about our expectations. Obama is pleased to have served two terms as President. Trump is unhappy to have served only one. Unlike Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton, I am content to have served none. We judge happiness by our expectations. "Who would think himself unhappy if he had only one mouth and who would not if he had only one eye?" ( Pensees 117)             A success in life (such as a play well directed) makes me happy. It creates a flush of well-being, an inner glow. I circulate after the show shaking hands. I go to bed smiling. But it also stimulates me to create a new norm, to raise the bar. If I'm not asked to direct again, or if I do and the production is mediocre, I feel bad. Even equivalent success on the next play comes only as a relief, not a blessing, because it is expected. It's the new normal. If I depend ...

  Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 novel, The City and the Stars, describes city a billion years in the future where the inhabitants are minds downloaded into artificial bodies from files stored in a central computer. They live a thousand years in each body, after which their minds are stored as computer files--there are more uploaded minds than there is space for host bodies--for eventual future downloading. Less than sixty years after Clarke's book, in 2013, a New York conference sponsored by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov promised that something like this would become reality by 2045. Martine Rothblatt, a tech company CEO, predicted the imminent development of "mindclones" run on "mindware" that would be genuinely alive and conscious. Though arguably only computer simulations of their originals, such electronic mind-copies could, in theory, be replicated indefinitely. Uploaded into any suitable host machine, a person could live, if not forever, far beyond ...

  There's an important distinction between natural suffering and suffering caused by human actions. Natural suffering is inevitable however careful we are. Diseases, accidents, and aging happen. I could blame God for not making a pain-free world, but I don't see what good that would do. With any luck, though, I can minimize the suffering my actions cause to others. It isn't easy. Like everyone else, I tend to understand the world as a movie in which I am the star--to see everything, including suffering, as less important as it recedes farther from me in time and space. It takes imagination and grace to escape this ego-centric illusion and to recognize the collective social assumptions (in Marxist terms, the ideologies)  that pass for laws of nature and whitewash much of the suffering we humans cause. Karl Marx is a curious case, a family man who lived in poverty and died in exile. Born to financial privilege, he renounced it out of a passion to better the lives of the poo...