Category: Philosophy
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Love – Open, Honest and Unconditional
These words, moving and heartening, are from the blog of Bart Ehrman, the perhaps uniquely agnostic/atheistic Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. He tells how his mother found it very hard to understand and accept his eventual departure from his early evangelical Christian faith. Their relationship, however, managed to work through […]
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A Hand Shake across Thousands of Years
When caves are mentioned, some of us may still imagine unwashed, unshaven, grunting brutes lumbering about, dragging women behind them by the hair. These hand prints from the Cave of El Castillo, made at least 37 centuries ago, tell a different story. Let’s think about how movingly astounding they are. Early humans worshipped the Earth […]
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The Non-Tribal Religion of the Future?
I stopped being a Christian minister forty years ago, and don’t now attend any church, but I’d gladly have listened to the late Bishop John Shelby Spong. And if I were to have my time over again, this is along the lines of what I’d want to say, not that it might be welcomed. Bishop […]
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Baba Yaga – The Fascination of Folklore
A Russian person, seeing this 18th century Norwegian house, would recall Baba Yaga, who lived in a house on chicken legs. Baba Yaga was an ogress with raggedy clothing, crooked teeth, a hunched back, and a long nose that touched the ceiling when she lay on her bed. Her house on legs could turn itself […]
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Let There Be Light !
The Greek philosopher Thales had an idea that was right and wrong. He thought there must be one thing from which all others were made, and decided this was water. It’s one thing, yet it can be solid, liquid or gas, and it’s essential for life – dead things dry up. That was a reasonable […]
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Heart on (heretical) Sleeve
After sharing some thoughts with a friend, I want to try to put into words what ‘religion’ means to me. It’ll make sense to some, though not perhaps to all. Joseph Campbell describes the “game of belief” that leads to a “divine seizure”, his use of the word ‘game’ (as in Wittgenstein’s philosophy) not meaning […]
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“Here comes the Sun”
WE’RE inclined to forget that the Sun, which we so enjoy when it’s shining on us (but not too fiercely), and which we so much miss when the days are short-lived and freezing, is a furiously raging nuclear furnace. It’s turning hydrogen into helium, and releasing the resultant energy in everything from blistering surface bubbles […]
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Awareness, Consciousness, Experience, Mind
Is there anything we can be absolutely certain is ‘real’? The answer to that question is, yes! There is one thing, and it is consciousness. Always however, and especially here, we need to define our terms, lest there be any misunderstandings. By ‘consciousness’ I mean subjective experience, whether of thoughts, of feelings, or of sights, […]
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Unconditional Love (ii)
I wrote in a previous post that, for me, the symbolic image of Jesus with his arms outstretched on the cross, is a movingly powerful symbol of ‘unconditional love’, which I see as the ‘beating heart’ of Christianity, and its greatest gift to the world. I also noted that my own journey towards this persuasion […]
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