Where do I begin with a piece so ridiculous, so imbued with superstition, and so dependent on seeing “truth” as “what makes you feel good”, that it would take hours to properly dissect it? I suppose I can say that this long op-ed by NYT columnist Ross Douthat, a religious Catholic and a conservative, seems to be of a piece with a new movement among liberals: softness towards religion. All over the MSM, which includes the NYT and even The Free Press, we see articles telling us—despite the rise of “nones”—that we must have religion to keep society together; and (check the Free Press link), scholars, intellectuals, and public figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson are become more explicitly religious. They apparently have realized something that’s escaped the rest of us. Examine your belly, and perhaps you’ll see the “god-shaped hole” invariably mentioned in these articles.
In this piece (click below or find the piece archived her , Douthat tells us that, if we’re without faith, we have to fix that situation immediately. And then he tells us how to go about choosing a faith. Speaking personally, I can’t find my god-shaped hole, nor do I feel I need a faith to improve my well being or give meaning to my life. Moreover, I don’t understand how, if I were to follow Douthat’s instructions and find a congenial faith (his is Catholicism, but he says others will do), I could force myself to believe something that I find unbelievable. Perhaps some propagandizing, á la Orwell, could do it, but nobody wants that kind of treatment.
First, though, I give the data from a Pew Survey of America’s “nones”—people without a formal religious affiliation—from 2007 till now. You can see a more or less steady rise over time, with a stasis or even a drop occurring rarely, and then a 3% drop between 2022 and 2023. I suppose that people like Douthat are pinning their “god-shaped hole” hypothesis on this one year of data, as if people in 2022 suddenly realized that their lives lacked meaning without God. But seriously, we’d need more data than this to show that Americans are becoming less religious. My own guess is that “nones” will resume their increase, and then level off at an asymptote that is higher, representing a level of agnosticism or atheism that won’t be exceeded because there are some people that really do need religion or inherit it from their parents.
Remember, too, that some of these “nones” are spiritual, panthesists, or believers in something numinous or supernatural; they’re simply those people unaffiliated with a church. But even atheists and agnostics have grown; as Wikipedia notes in its article on “Irreligion in the United States“:
According to Pew, all three subgroups that together make up the religious “nones” have grown over time: in 2021, atheists were 4% (up from 2% in 2011), 5% agnostics (3% a decade before) and 20% “nothing in particular” (14% ten years before). In 2023, atheists are still 4%.
Here are the nones:
Other countries are even more irreligious: here’s another Pew-file-derived map from 2010: 15 years ago, showing the percentage of “nones. Many countries then, like Australia, Canada most of Western Europe and Scandinavia, and of course China (formerly a godless Communist land) have more nones than America, and this trend is also increasing.
Here’s a figure from the WaPo showing the rise of atheism (not “nones”) in Iceland, and it’s striking: there are more nonbelievers than believers.
As for other countries in Scandinavia, I urge you to read Phil Zuckerman’s book
All this is to show that, at least in the West, religion is on the decline, and people like Douthat ignore all the data showing that. Rather, they are promoting faith because the world is not a particularly great place right now (some of it has to do with Trump, some with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza), and also because they are “believers in belief”, those who either aren’t religious but like the “little people” argument for belief, or, alternatively those who want to justify their own belief by showing how it helped them and could help others. I do think that religion can help some people, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who suffered from depression, but that in general it is a societal impairment: a form of delusion that we really can do without (see Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress).
On to Douthat’s Big Push for Faith:
The first thing he does is to assert, without any proof or links, that religion is on the rise and “nones” on the wane (I urge you to check out the link below):
The long rise of the Nones, Americans with no religious affiliation, has seemingly reached its limit, and a fascination with the numinous shadows our culture once again. Within the intelligentsia there is a wave of notable conversions and a striking nostalgia for belief.
The link goes to a Free Press article full of anecdotes: notable people like Jordan Peterson and Hirsi Ali who have become religious. But of course this says nothing about the general trend. He then dismisses atheism, which is a bad thing to do. Why go looking for the “right” religion for you when there is no evidence for a God? Later Douthat says that we don’t need to find a religion whose epistemic claims are true, but, for crying out loud, it’s a “god-shaped hole” and you must fill it by finding a religion with a god. My definition of religion has always been Dan Dennett’s take from his book Breaking the Spell:
“social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought”
Now this may not apply to some forms of faith, like Zen Buddhism, but it’s good enough for me as it covers all the Abrahamic faiths as well as faiths like Hinduism. And remember, Douthat is concerned with filling the god-shaped hole to give our lives meaning:
The ultimate goal of the sincere religious quest is a relationship or an experience of grace that can’t be obtained through reasoning alone. But for the open-minded person who hasn’t received divine direction, a religious quest can still be a rational undertaking — not a leap into pure mystery but a serious endeavor with a real hope of making progress toward the truth.
Here we see another problem: Douthat never defines what “truth” is. He dismisses the need to choose religions based on the empirical truth of their tenets, so I suppose he means the slippery notion of a “true” religion is “one that feels right.” And that’s how he largely proceeds in this tedious article.
To dispose of the need for empirical truths when choosing a faith, Douthat simply says that they’re all true in a way, but some are more true than others—that is, some feel more right than others:
The starting place for this endeavor is the recognition that Dawkins is simply wrong about the requirement for believers to disbelieve in every other faith. The bookstore of all religions isn’t necessarily a library of total falsehoods with one lonely truth hidden somewhere on the shelves, and embracing one revelation doesn’t require believing that every other religion is made up.
A sincere believer in Hindu polytheism, for instance, doesn’t need to assume that the singular God of the monotheistic faiths is just a fiction: Jehovah might be one deity among many, whose powers were exaggerated by his adherents but whose deeds were entirely real. Or alternatively a Hindu might interpret his faith’s pantheon as localized expressions of a single ultimate divinity and regard the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as a way of personifying that divinity as well.
. . .So the religious seeker, looking out across a diverse religious landscape, should assume that there exist less-true and more-true schools of thought, not one truth and a million fictions. And this suggests, crucially, that even if you start in what turns out to be a wronger-than-average place, you can still draw closer to ultimate reality by conforming yourself to whatever that tradition still gets right.
What does he mean by “gets right”? But wait! There’s more!
. . . .This principle does not presume that all religions are identical, that there is no scenario in which any soul is ever lost. (Certainly it was not a matter of indifference to Lewis whether people worshiped Aslan or Tash.) The idea, rather, is that if God ordered the universe for human beings, then even a flawed religion will probably contain intimations of that reality — such that a sincere desire to find and know the truth will find some kind of reward.
Yep, any religion can fill part of that hole, perhaps not as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle, but better than atheism could.
He concludes that the more popular religions are more likely to be “true”, but that could be tautological if you define “truth” as “satisfying psychological needs”. I still define “truth” as “what exists in the universe and can reliably be confirmed by others,” or, as the OED says:
Something that conforms with fact or reality.
NOT “something that makes you psychologically satisified”. That definition isn’t in there! Saying the more popular religions are more true is meaningless. Douthat:
This doesn’t imply, however, that a religious search should begin at random. Rather, you should start the way you would in any other arena, by looking for wisdom in crowded places, in collective insights rather than just individual ones, in traditions that have inspired civilizations, not temporary communities.
If this sounds like an argument that the more popular and enduring world religions are more likely than others to be true, that’s exactly what I’m arguing.
Yes, if a new revelation suddenly arrives, there will be a moment when the truest faith will be one of the smallest. But if a faith claims to be much truer than the competition, it’s reasonable to expect proof of those qualities to emerge on a reasonable timeline, to see world-historical and not just individual effects. So for the novice, it makes sense to start with religions in which those effects are already manifest and there’s no question that the faith has staying power.
Here he seems to see “truth” as the OED sees it: a “true” religion makes empirical claims (“conforming with fact or reality”) that are verifiable. But in that case no religion is truer than others! And we all know about the conflicting empirical claims of even the major Abrahamic faiths: who was the prophet, was Jesus resurrected, what miracles were done, and so on.
I don’t want to repeat the criteria Douthat gives for choosing the best faith for you. (For example, if you don’t want too much supernatural stuff, he suggests you choose a more humanistic religion.) But there always has to be a god in it, and absent any convincing evidence for such a being (again, Douthat doesn’t discuss this), I don’t know why you should go choosing a religion in the first place, since all of them (according to my definition) include that supernatural being.
He moves more towards Christianity, of course, because he’s a Catholic.
Or the big question might be: How has God acted in history? In that case, you don’t want to start at the end of things, comparing the systems that the followers of Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha constructed to explain the revelation. You want to start with the taproot — with the allegedly divine person, the allegedly sacred book, the historical credibility of the story and the immediate consequences for the world.
If you have no strong reaction to the core stories, you can step back and use other questions to chart your path. But if you find Jesus to be a remarkable figure and the Gospels shockingly credible, if God speaks to you through the Bhagavad Gita or the Quran or the Pentateuch, if Buddha’s teaching seems like the answer to the riddles of your life — well, you probably shouldn’t simply return to the more abstract questions.
No: If you feel yourself to have a completely open mind and suddenly a specific text or figure leaps out at you, then you should take the possibility that God is speaking to you seriously; at the very least, it’s a signal that this is where you’re supposed to start.
But again: what is the evidence that God exists, much less than he’s speaking to you personally? Finally, Douthat winds up with a story that sort of pulls the reader towards Jesus:
Consider the story of religious pilgrimage offered recently by the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. Raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, he found that spiritual interests grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.
He found that worship in actual paganism, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments and some stark mystical experiences as well.
But it would have been unimaginable to him at the start of the journey that the Christian faith imparted to him weakly in his childhood — that “ancient, tired religion” as he put it — could have possibly been his destination in the end. Only the act of questing delivered him back to the initial place, no longer old and tired but fresh and new.
Clearly, Kingsnorth found the truth!
In the end, I consider the whole piece worthless given the lack of definition of a “true” religion and the slippery alternation between truth seen as psychological comfort and truth seen in the empirical sense as what really exists. And, of course, shouldn’t you begin your quest with evidence for god in hand?
At the conclusion of the piece, we learn that this spate of advice is taken from an upcoming book by Douthat:
This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.”
That is one book I’m not going to review. And really, could Douthat tell me why I should be religious? I don’t harbor a god-shaped hole nor do I feel that my life lacks meaning. Douthat just wants to know that he’s in good company, living in a fully religious world.
h/t: Barry
Assumes any given religion wants new “believers” — which are Inclusive of political activists, useful for subversion.
I like to fill my god-shaped hole with doughnuts and good liquor.
I wonder how much Douthat would pay me to review the book? I might be interested, if it’s not crypto. Hey, it’s a long winter in upstate New York!
I read the article yesterday and felt exactly the same way as you. But wait, there more!
So much of what people claim to believe in leads back to financial incentives. The rise of Nones, and even more, the lack of church attendance has created a financial crisis for many religious groups.
So not only are they trying to get people to choose any religion but they want taxpayers to fund their shortfall.
School choice is the big one. That gets them both money and potential followers. And not having to pay taxes sure helps. Over the next few years I expect to see many more ways for religion to use taxpayers to fund their crusade.
As someone who has died I can assure you that there was no white light or pearly gates appearing after death. I was in an ambulance when my wife saw my head roll over and shouted at the paramedic “whats happening?”. They had to pull over to the side of the road and move my wife out then attach the leads for the machine to shock me which took longer than it takes to read that sentence. I was therefore dead for at least 45 seconds before any power was put through me and in truth I saw nothing at all in that time. I could not say I was disappointed because since I left my C of E School I was unable to continue believing in an all powerful being who had never taken any of the evil so and so’s like hitler or stalin
off the face of the earth before they killed so many innocents. I am truly sorry to burst anyone’s bubble but that truly happened to me and confirmed what I had concluded many years ago and why I stopped attending church.
A secularist can find plenty fulfillment by doing what they are interested in. Ones’ passion can pretty easily take the place of the so-called god shaped hole.
Think of your hobbies that you very much enjoy doing. Think of how much you enjoy shooting the sh*t with your friends, or reading a good book. There. The god shaped hole must be filled in me bc I have do desire to join a cult or religion or whatever, and I try to spend most of my free time just meeting goals that are fun for me.
I wonder if Douthat would become more secular if he started collecting Kewpie dolls, or building model railroad sets.
Or writing further fanfic about his real or mythical saviour. “The Book of Ross” has a nice ring to it.
Good review. Amazing how theologians can spew so much empty blather out of nothing. False assumptions, zero evidence of God and ill warranted condescension towards nones. That was the basis of his claims. Snake oil salesmen never change. We nones in Australia will likely outnumber the religious in next year’s census. Can’t wait to see the flustered Catholic leaders over here make similar empty rants.
I’m sorry but I have no patience for his self serving mumbo-jumbo whining. Maybe, just maybe if he read any one of your books, or any of Brian Greene’s wonderfully clear expositions on the origins of the universe, or any of Dennett, Pinker, Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.,and then concluded that his “beliefs” are truer because they are so so comforting and, of course, profitable. The god shaped hole can be easily filled in by simply looking at any insect under a magnifying glass or better, observing a group of sparrows scavenging and think of their dinosaur cousins with feathers.
Yes. My answer to those who need to fill their GSH is, get a life.
You have the patience of a saint (pardon the expression). I read the article but in no way am I patient enough to disentangle the mess in a systematic way. I will mention that Douthat strains credibility for trying to argue that the various religions are all compatible. Don’t they hold to contradictory empirical claims?
Yet Douthat persists, even though his entire premise—that “noneness” has topped out and that masses of people are clamoring for something desperately to hold on to—is wrong. This claim has about as much veracity as Trump’s “So many people are telling me that… .” Why the New York Times allowed Douthat so much space is beyond me.
Douthat: “…you should start the way you would in any other arena, by looking for wisdom in crowded places, in collective insights rather than just individual ones, in traditions that have inspired civilizations, not temporary communities.” So, religion really is a mind virus! Good to know!
“Or the big question might be: How has God acted in history?” That’s an easy one! Undetectable! Now, how have adherents to your religion acted in history? The less said the better, I’ll bet.
The Four Horsemen respond to Douthat:
Dennett: The god-shaped hole evolves! It’s the only kind of hole worth having.
Harris: My neuro-tantric researches have duplicated the 3-hour Sting orgasm!
Hitchens: It’s an 18 year old, single malt shaped hole.
Dawkins: I have written a new children’s trilogy about Evensong and pretty churches.
PCC(E): Hall and Oates! They complete me.
The near-Magellanic hubris of thinking the universe was ordered for humans, along with the midwit nod to C. S. Lewis, tells you all you need to know.
Just deeply unserious stuff, unworthy of a serious reply. Christ, the stupid Trilemma is a better argument.
I am filling my god hole with screams into the abyss.
“That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spot-light
Crowd-sourcing my religion . . . ”
With apologies to REM.
I’m glad I don’t subscribe to the New York Times, because I would hate to financially support a sanctimonious sophist like Douthat. His desperate idea that a “sincere believer in Hindu polytheism” can still believe in “the singular God of the monotheistic faiths” is laughable; if the Hindu merely regards Jehovah as “one deity among many,” then he hardly believes in a “singular God”! Are we supposed to imagine that Christians would be happy with accept a polytheist as a believer? And why should a Hindu bother with Jeohovah when the other Hindu Gods are far more interesting and fulfill his roles?
Douthat’s argument reeks of desperation. He wants to people to believe in any religion because he knows religion is on the wane, and because he thinks people who start believing in any old religion will eventually be drawn to Christianity, “the one true religion.” Pathetic! He thinks that if a religion is popular then there must be some truth to it, yet doesn’t realize that many popular religions have ended up on the scrap heap. Why expect belief in Jesus to last forever when belief in Zeus, Osiris and so many others has not? Widespread delusions have been all too common among humankind. We are rational enough to know how irrational we can be, especially in groups.
That Douthat finds “the Gospels shockingly credible” is shockingly incredible. But what we can expect from someone who thinks having an “open mind” means uncritically accepting any creed that sounds nice? He shouts “Believe in something, someone, anything! It’ll eventually lead to you to Jesus! Like with Paul Kingsworth!” That’s the sum of his sorry argument. Still, it has given us another blackmark against religion: do you really want to believe in something defended by Ross Douthat?
ONE MORE
We’ve put aside Isis and Zeus and Thor,
And Gaia is now merely metaphor;
Their twilight grows darker, there’s just one more,
One more god.
© 2024, no charge for noncommercial use, all other rights reserved.
Very nice!
When he claimed that many religions don’t claim to be the only way, it was obvious to me that he was completely tone-deaf to the beliefs of the majority of Christians and Muslims.
The longevity and popularity of various religious faiths are more attributable to the printing press and literacy than to these being evidence of the truth of any particular religion. Good grief. If Zeus and Osiris had had better publicists…
I’ll join the One True Religion. Y’all let me know when you figure out which that is.
A quick comment on your perhaps generous suggestion that [Zen] Buddhism may be an exception to Dennett’s definition of “religion”…. Dennett focuses on supernatural agents, while earlier definitions focused simply on the supernatural, as in Tylor’s classic suggestion that “religion” is a set of beliefs and practices regarding the supernatural. For various forms of Buddhism, that quintessentially supernatural feature is reincarnated — Buddhists like to deny that they believe in a permanent “soul”, but it is often difficult to distinguish that component of a living being that is reincarnated from a “soul” — and it’s certainly supernatural….
The GSH is most clearly seen from the caudal view.
I chortled.
On the cat we called that “license plate zero.”
He obviously hasn’t looked at any of the data. Both a Gallup poll and the World Happiness Report show that the happiest countries in the world are the most secular, and the least happy are religious. The more impoverished a country is the more religious it is. Poverty = less education. Data show that the more education one receives the less likely they are to be religious (the US is an outlier). How would Ross respond to the actual data?
My “hole” gets filled with Nature, much like how the Founding Fathers filled theirs. Biology has so many miracles and mysteries that we can actually witness in the world.
The god shaped hole is an illusion (no surprises) bought on by a myopic self regulated torture regime of the grass is greener over anywhere but here.
If you are missing anything it is the ability to be rational and the use of reason based on reality.
Death will fix it and none of the above will matter apart from imo, a life living a lie is not even second to understanding how the place really works and the wonder that that instills for a life, short, long, or otherwise.
I expect the experience of death to be similar to the experience of propofol anesthesia. When I had my hip replaced, the propofol immediately caused nonexistence, followed by what seemed almost immediate wakening. Death will be like this, without the awakening, i.e., the long dirt nap.
I think most religions are based on our fear of death and our inability to conceive of our nonexistence. A book I read a few years ago ‘Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind,’ by Arjik Varki and Danny Brower, posits that at some point in our evolutionary history, we became aware of the finality of death and, with this brutal realization, had to co-evolve a strong denial mechanism to prevent our species from self-extinction resulting from the behavioral effects of this realization. I don’t know if there is any solid genetic proof of this (I doubt it), and it may be a ‘just so’ story, but I find the concept intriguing. This denial mechanism is posited as the main reason for religion.
“I think most religions are based on our fear of death and our inability to conceive of our nonexistence.”
You might want to distinguish between “most religions” and “most religious people.” I think it is arguable that there are a few eschatological religions such as Christianity or Islam that have millions of adherents, but if you count the number of ‘local’ religions (in Weber’s sense) in small-scale societies, there are probably thousands of such religions that are more concerned with the classic issues of animism, including control over daily events in life, rather than death.
Good point. I agree.
Douthat’s argument here isn’t really an argument for religion, but another nail in the coffin. Once you’re encouraging people to shop around the Mall of Religions and see what version of spiritual truth works best for them, it’s game over.
Oh sure, well worn confirmation bias techniques like deciding that if “a specific text or figure leaps out at you, then you should take the possibility that God is speaking to you seriously” may lead to an uptick in upticks — but without a passionate conviction that a religion must be true even if people don’t like what it says or where it leads, it’s only a temporary tick.
No matter. If God really ordered the universe so that “a sincere desire to find and know the truth will find some kind of reward,” then atheism is its own reward, and Humanism is God.
From the map above.
Do note what I write here from time to time: Japan as about the least religious country (China doesn’t count bc they have no real choice about…well… anything).
Japanese do and they reject religion wholesale. What we see as “religion” there is mainly aesthetics devoid of moral precepts and orders.
One of the reasons I’m a Japanophile and lived there. Like Scandinavia there’s huge social trust and arguably they are the best, richest countries to live in outside the US.
D.A.
NYC
Look, I truly believe that Ceiling Cat, Pinker, and to a lesser extent Dawkins, have a g-d-shaped hole in their hearts—not in the Douthat or Hirsi Ali sense, but in a way they themselves don’t quite recognize. Their greatest blind spot is failing to see that their own mentalizing (Ceiling Cat forgive me) serves a cognitive niche that g-d fills for others. But it is not the same thing.
I propose—and really, I should publish on this—that there exists a space in the mind that g-d (and new age spirituality) occupies, which mentalizers also fill, yet their version does not substitute the meaning lost in g-d’s absence. Mentalizers never found g-d meaningful, and what they have found instead is no replacement for what the vast majority of humankind, who don’t mentalize as much, find in religion.
I want the atheist, secular-humanizing, rationalizing, essay-writing mentalizing—and more. And that more is not g-d, but it is something greater than what my dear friends in secular humanism have yet to articulate. Dawkins has come the closest in his descriptions of awe, but awe is still a mentalizing emotion. Fiction gets closer, but even fiction is not enough. So there. For whatever this incomplete thought is worth. 😈😈😈😈😇
I can’t speak for The Greats you mention but over the decades I’ve found my own opinions mesh with theirs pretty closely.
There’s no hole.
All you describe exists but….and this is important Roz… everything can be described and explained by physics and chemistry: biology and everything we experience are downstream from that. If that proposition is one’s staring point, atheism is easy. Inevitable I’d argue.
we have human emotions, including awe and ecstasy and mystery and longing… for reasons which can be described by evolution and our changing environment.
No god needed, no holes.
best regards as usual,
D.A.
NYC
Yes, I’m describing biology, chemistry, and physics, and not speaking about anything supernatural. When people think about “g-d,” whatever is in their head is in their head with no measurable correlation to anything in the physical universe.
So, the “g-d-shaped” hole isn’t about a supernatural being. It’s about human experience and humans trying to feel alive and fulfilled.
I hypothesize that all humans have an instinct for mentalizing and that some crave it without having high IQs (those who only turn to religion), some crave it with mentalizing about the objective world, and some crave it even more than what the latter can bring (e.g., Hirsi Ali).
To put it bluntly, a high IQ is no replacement for “g-d” for some. (And when I write “g-d” here and in my comment above, I don’t mean a supernatural being that exists, but rather an image in people’s heads and a system of belief and inner experience that unfolds in relation to that.)
Basically, while I’m sure I disagree with Hirsi Ali in specifics, for instance, I believe what she means is that a higher IQ, with all the glory that mentalizing can bring, is insufficient for her to have the most rewarding life possible.
People are wired in different ways. Ceiling Cat and Pinker may not need an internal system of images aside from their mentalizing to make them fulfilled. Others need some kind of non-mentalizing mentalizing, if I may say something that sounds ridiculous but which I believe may be true.
We do need stories that comfort us and provide meaning, I think.
I do not believe in god or in the supernatural, but I’ve amused myself by creating my own pantheon of (mostly) nature gods, along with stories about their doings.
And I still enjoy some of the gospel stories.
Maybe those of us who need to can fill the so-called GSH via story while simultaneously understanding that fantasy/fiction is one thing, and reality quite something else.
That last part is an important point people everywhere seem to find it easy to overlook. We so want our fictions to be true.
I found my god-shaped hole and f*d it!
I know, too much, but it seems a reasonable response to Dou-dolittle’s tripe.
Sorry PCC(e) for breaking the family-site roolz…
Choose a religion? Ok.
I used to believe that all books are 100% the product of human minds. A very extreme view apparently according to folks like Ross Douthat.
But now I’m ready to be religious and choose to believe that at least one book is not 100% the product of human minds. And that one book is the King James Bible.
No wait. Maybe the Roman Catholic version instead…going with the original. But that is long! So just the Torah…much shorter. Or maybe none of the above…Koran it is! Or maybe its that Book of Mormon…they seem a lot more chill.
You know what, I’m going back to my original position that there are NO magic books written by an invisible perfect eternal person.
« A god shaped hole » do other readers of this blog find this expression obscene? Or is it because I’m French?
Best
We do!
God shaped hole?!
🤣
My ar$e…
Look up “nonsense” in your Funk and Wagnalls, and you’ll find a picture of a ‘god-shaped hole.’
Personally I wouldn’t be too quick to choose a faith for the simple reason that all religious institution is a all too human theological construct of interpretation. That is to say nothing has been revealed except maybe the extremes of hubris and vanity that can infect the human condition. That is not to say don’t meditate quietly on the idea of God. Just remember that religion has nothing to do with that potential. I say potential for this reason. As our species attempts to confront problems facing both mankind and the earth itself, without any plausible possibility of resolving those conundrums, It may be a good time to imagine, that if this planet is indeed ‘created’ then the time may be close for the creator to save it from the destructive hand of mankind. And that will probably also make for a ‘judgement’ the folly of man’s failed attempt to comprehend the mind of God. Expect ecclesiatic feathers to fly!