Posts tagged “Religion”

Too much reading

From The Truth by Terry Pratchett: He was the younger son in any case, and family tradition sent youngest sons into some church or other, where they couldn’t do much harm on a physical level. But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way […]

What I’ve Noticed

A Phoenix nun was demoted for saving a woman’s life. Religious hospitals are kind of frightening. Already environmentally devastated areas, like mine tailings, might be a good place to install solar projects. A tragedy of “security:” “military personnel were so worried about getting their trucks into the proper place that they crushed a 68-year-old woman […]

What I’ve Noticed

Anti-vaxxers are a blast from the past – who knew whooping cough would still be killing people in developed countries in the 21st century? Important information that your intro stats professor likely didn’t mention. While cutting classes and entire programs, reducing pay for already underpaid professors, and laying people off right and left, my university […]

Where is your god?

From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: One day the Gestapo hanged a child.  … The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows.  Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where […]

Family Values

From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: To make such human, historical phenomena as Christian “Family Values,” “Islam,” or “the Holy Land” the focus of religious devotion is a new form of idolatry.  This type of belligerent righteousness has been a constant temptation to monotheists throughout the long […]

Imagining God

From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination.  Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty.  It has […]

The God of the Fundamentalists

From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Once the Bible begins to be interpreted literally instead of symbolically, the idea of its God becomes impossible.  To imagine a deity who is literally responsible for everything that happens on earth involves impossible contradictions.  The “God” of the Bible ceases […]