Karen Armstrong says God is like a melody.

Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof…Hence all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology.

If you say so (and of course ‘at its best’ covers a multitude of sins – at my best I am a paragon of wit and virtue, but my best is oddly elusive). But that is (I can’t help assuming) because the ‘the’ in ‘theology’ is so flexible, so adaptable, so shape-shifting, so all things to all people, that it makes just as much sense to say that theology at its best aspires to the condition of poetry, … Read the rest

We’re in luck – we have a whole new barrage of clichés to set us straight.

David Adams Richards is angry. The acclaimed novelist and essayist is raging at atheists, the self-righteous ones. The writer with the tough New Brunswick background believes anti-religious people are as bad as fundamentalists in their fashionable absolutism.

Does he! How exciting! How novel, how original, how refreshing, how ground-breaking.

Not that I can talk – I don’t break new ground. I think there’s a place for saying things that have been said before, because the mere fact that something has been said before doesn’t mean that everyone knows that, so there is always room for popularizers to help circulate that which has been said … Read the rest

Often, when one cites Millian views on liberty, open discussion and the like, it emerges that people think Mill was talking only about legal rights. He wasn’t.

The fourth paragraph of On Liberty:

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant–society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it–its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any

What does it all matter? I’ve been engaging in a couple of blog discussions of that question – about why people get so riled about Mooney and Kirshenbaum, what’s at stake, whence comes all the heat. (I’ve also lost a friend over it, a price I resent paying.)

One way of explaining is to quote a little of the preface to The God Delusion. It starts with Lalla Ward’s misery at school and her parents’ asking why she never said she wanted to leave and her reply: ‘But I didn’t know I could.’

Lots of people don’t know they can, and it is worth letting them know: you can. (You can even invoke ‘Yes we can’ if you want … Read the rest