Posts filed under “Books”
And that arrogance has led to so much trouble
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Denys’s God has two aspects: one is turned toward us and manifests himself in the world; the other is the far side of God as he is in himself, which remains entirely incomprehensible. He “stays within himself” in his eternal mystery, […]
If only God hadn’t made women . . .
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves. Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in particular. Even though Christianity had […]
Making space for God
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic. The Pharisees were passionately spiritual Jews. They believed that the whole of Israel was called to be a holy nation […]
Special snowflakes sure do kill a lot of innocent people
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: The Jews have often been criticized for their belief that they are the Chosen People, but their critics have often been guilty of the same kind of denial that fueled the diatribes against idolatry in biblical times. … Western Christians […]
Maybe capitalism isn’t the best philosophy
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: To suppose that the living standard of the rest of the world can be raised to that of the most prosperous countries, with existing technology and current levels of consumption and waste, is a dream in pursuit of a mathematical impossibility. Even to level out present-day income […]
Can we choose who we will become before we know who we are?
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. There is no genetic destiny outside our free will, no lodestar provided by which we can set course. Evolution, including genetic progress in human nature and human capacity, will […]
The next step
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: On the one side, ethics and religion are still too complex for present-day science to explain in depth. On the other, they are far more a product of autonomous evolution than hiterto conceded by most theologians. Science faces in ethics and religion its most interesting and possibly […]