A Curious Little Blog

I like to give credit where credit is due, and therefore I will point out a place that I agree with William James.  He writes, When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_," I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? I appreciate that, because many people who study religion try to reduce it to something easily explainable, something where they do not have to grapple with the question of divinity, and here James shows how little sense it makes to ignore divinity, or to add it in only as something inescapable but not really tangible. On the other hand, James himself reduces the mystical union with God to a person's union with his own unconscious, which seems to be going in the same directionl.  He says, Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whateve...

I am almost done with William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience."  Up until the last few chapters, I found it a fair-minded discussion of religion.  James seems not to believe in a religion, but he goes out of his way to treat it seriously.  The book provides a lot of interesting examples of conversions, spiritual despair, saintliness, and mysticism.  (Almost all but the last are from Christians.) Then he gets to a chapter on religious philosophy, and he burns through all the good will I had developed for him.  He begins by giving some academic theology by John Henry Newman about God, such as this:  "This makes Him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God is being itself."  (He cites Newman at some length, which I will not do because it is boring.)  And he concludes that Newman's theology is fairly abstract and pointless, which I find difficult to argue with.  How...

According to Elizabether Warren, “It is not enough to have a good heart … we are called to act,” Warren said. ”We are on the moral side of history.”  And Cory Booker is even more emphatic:  “I’m here to call on folks to understand that in a moral moment, there is no neutral. In a moral moment, there is no bystanders,” he said. “You are either complicit in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it.”  (Quotations cited in The Hill .) What is this great evil?  Genocide?  Slavery?  No, it is the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Are they angry because of the sexual assault that Christine Ford accuses Kavanaugh of?  No, these quotations are from July, long before anyone (other than Dianne Feinstein) was aware of those accusations. Democrats often complain that Republicans inject religion into politics, but if you listen to their language, they are the ones speaking in terms of religion....

Here is a book, The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, that I have been vaguely aware of for many years without having any idea what it was about. I am fortunate that an audio version exists thanks to Librivox.org. I could read it, of course, but it is a massive book (well over 800 pages) and I doubt I would be motivated enough to read it through without something else to hope for from the effort than a little enlightenment. So here is the book: it is about a Roman priesthood, succession to which was determined by challenging and killing the existing priest. That's right, you remained priest as long as someone else didn't kill you. This curious priesthood existed into Imperial times, and Frazer sets out to explain why it had such a curious means of choosing new leaders. With that introduction out of the way, most of the rest of the book is not about this particular priesthood at all, but about magic and religion in primitive societies in general. I say ...

Spinoza is a famous philosopher about whom I have heard very little.  I had a vague notion that he believed the world to consist of monads, and that he conceived of "God" as the same as natural laws.  Apart from that, I couldn't have told you anything about his ideas.  I used to think that this relative obscurity was because Spinoza did not influence other philosophers to a great extent, but I am learning that some people admired him greatly.  I suppose that he is not associated with a single idea that makes him easy to locate in the history of philosophy, the way Hume means scepticism, Kant means "thing-in-itself," and Decartes means dualism.  Or, it could be because his philosophy is too obscure to sum up. This particular work is certainly not obscure.  It is about as clear as anything could be, which is something that I appreciate, having no stomach for writers who try to enhance their fame by writing in a way that no one understands.  In fact, th...