July 12, 2014
Twin Towers of the Intellect
Both the theologian, advancing abstract definitions of Deity as the Ground of Being, transcendent of language and intellection, the impersonal prime mover, hardly so limited and vengeful and silly as […]
December 12, 2013
The Future of an Identity
Even the bitterest hater of religion would concede it is exceedingly unlikely to vanish–not least because antireligious ideologues end up behaving like a religious community, with group-forming behavior (and group […]
November 16, 2013
The Scripture Reads You
Scriptures, because they are bound as books, are considered to be books; and the metaphor that extremists of any stripe (religious or antireligious) have in their heads is that of […]
May 11, 2013
Neureligion
There is very little (if any) variability in the brains of human beings regarding cortical localization. That is, the motor cortex responsible for, say, left arm movement, is reliably […]
December 28, 2012
The Importance of Telling a Good Story
You would think that with scientific knowledge expanding ever so exponentially, and literalist interpretations of traditional scriptures undermined east and west by it, you would see a great popular surge […]
August 12, 2012
What is Truth?
Let us conceive of the mind as a weave of two fibers, as we consider muscle a weave of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles. The relative composition of a muscle is genetically […]
December 26, 2011
Mythistory; or Against Literalism
The last post, which ended with a note how myth and scripture are a foundation of literature (and, I should add, art and music), got me thinking about the preservation […]
December 21, 2011
Hitchens as a Man of Letters
The indifferent are not enemies of literature. They don’t value literature highly enough to do violence to it. The true enemy of literature is passionate about literature; he or she […]