Original Zen I When Einstein was asked Do you believe in God? He replied I believe in Spinoza’s god And who is that, one wonders? All that is and ought to be Now and forever Blue waves without end Stars and green mountains and red rivers Dark roiling matter without end II The eternal reunions […]
What is the Holy?
The holy is not the gods. Humans have been told about thousands of different gods, for thousands of years, primarily to steer us into obedience of earthly powers, and to make us give up our searching. The holy is not religion. Religions were designed to organize this obedience, to add layers and layers of fictional […]
The Divine Invention
The truly divine thing is invention, creation, imagination. All religions were created by novelists and poets. That has been on my mind and under my thoughts for decades. It reached the surface again tonight, like the creative process itself. In a rush, a burst, a light coming on against nuanced black. We tell stories. Some […]
The Moral Order
Is there a moral order in the universe? If so, does it come from a god, or some other force? If there is a moral order, is it something we should try to align ourselves with? I think about that a lot, when I walk outside, look at the stars, hike, swim in the sea, […]
The Ground of Change
Wright’s book is picking up steam. He writes with compression, gets to the point quickly, after marshaling his facts and evidence. And the story he tells is enthralling. Polytheism, to monolatry to monotheism. Some of it I already knew. But much of it is new to me, based upon recent excavations and readings of better, […]
The Sting of the Sun
About 100 pages into a fascinating new book, detailing the rise and fall of gods, goddesses, the religious impulse and its repercussions. The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright, is a general history, starting from the earliest hunter-gatherer societies, moving into chiefdoms after the discovery of agriculture, onto city-states in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and through […]
Multiplicity, Faith and History
Pascal said: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” He was thinking about the heavens, the stars, galaxies, night. He said in another pensée: “For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far […]
The Relativity of Illusion
From where I sit. From where you sit. It’s all relative. You’re deluded. No, you are. I think you both are. In The Great Weaver of Kashmir, the young Halldór Laxness, a future Nobel Prize winner, gives us ample opportunity as readers to judge much concerning delusions and illusions. The novel is ambiguous enough to […]