“In popular religious practice there isn’t always a clean line between this “immanent” religion and the transcendent alternative offered by Christianity and Judaism. ” https://buff.ly/2C8e98H Douthat should then re-write and re-think what he wrote in the paragraphs before this. His attempts henceforth in this article to explain the difference are awkward and shallow and full of caricature. “Until then, those Continue Reading
“this paganism is …deliberately agnostic about final things, what awaits beyond the shores of this world, and it is skeptical of the idea that there exists some ascetic, world-denying moral standard to which we should aspire.” — Douthat buff.ly/2C8e98H You’d better believe that it is “skeptical “, because “some ascetic, world-denying moral standard” is a dualism that is not found Continue Reading
“return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity. What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it; that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience Continue Reading
One of those mornings when I get up to go to the bathroom (this time at 2am) and sleep does not come when I get back into bed. Tried for over an hour. Got up finally at 3:30. Finally Mr. Sandman seems to be in the neighborhood.