While a creator god lacks a past, could an aspirational deity have a future? If we succeed over time in actualizing our finest attributes, would a god fashioned on our late example be worthy of its divinity? Would it be so terrible if human perfection someday attains the distinction of divinity in the minds of successor life forms when we go extinct?
Introduction I’ve begun attending monthly meetings of Socrates Café at the South Portland Library. Socrates Café is a gathering of citizens who get together by choice to discuss the big questions of life. Methods drawn from the book, Socrates Café, written by the program’s founder, Christopher Phillips, are used to guide discussion. The example of... Continue Reading →
End of Life Songs Suppositions about dying educe meanings for living. Death opposes life. Likewise, life addresses death. Death is for life a grand question and master teacher. What? When? Where? How? Why? Then? Meanings granted to death both enhance and diminish living. I first explored the interrogative quality of death sixty-two years ago in... Continue Reading →
Preface There is seemingly more babel per second on the public airwaves these days than ever before. The cacophony of white noise exceeds even the evocative power of the biblical story of Babel to penetrate and comprehend it. Given the discharge of daily excreta from Washington, what can anyone fruitfully say or listen to at... Continue Reading →
The terms conservative and liberal have a long currency in politics. Among other uses they mark ‘right’ and ‘left’ on the political spectrum. Republicans found it useful to invoke conservative principles in seeking to roll back Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation in the 1930s and 40s. They subsequently launched a ‘movement’ under the banner... Continue Reading →
After reading the description of my recently published book, Abdication: God Steps Down for Good, people occasionally inquire whether I’m an atheist. I tell them that I’m basically agnostic and a hopeful theist. It would be wonderful, to my way of thinking, if a convivial, non-dictatorial God existed. It’s a lonely world out there in... Continue Reading →
When earthlings begin high school, it would be great if a credible, straightforward master narrative of our species were available for parents and teachers to tell in launching and guiding the children on their way toward mature adulthood and enlightened citizenship. There are, I know, innumerable stories available for this general purpose in world literature. Then, too,... Continue Reading →
In a recent blog essay entitled God and War, two proposals were advanced to get God out of the war business. These proposals join six others in the book Abdication: God Steps Down for Good to form a program directed at this same goal. In the interest of complete information and full understanding, the eight... Continue Reading →
In an earlier blog essay, Religion and the Credibility of Science, I argued that religion and science are fundamentally opposed to each other. In the book Abdication: God Steps Down for Good, I make the same claim, but with a twist, namely that the two, while antagonistic, are also allies of one another! How can that... Continue Reading →
