Manmin Central Church were so psychologically manipulated by the pastor’s profession of being the agent of God, thus infallible and absolute, that despite his propagation of chastity to the group, he had been able to violate them for years.
11. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), p. 20.
12. The recent spate of books on “God,” tracing the evolution of the idea of “God,” make errors if they speak always of “God” in the singular, since most cultures have never limited beliefs in supranatural powers or beings to a single one, and the movement we see in human thought is not something that has simply gone “full circle” as Reza Aslan proposes, from a pantheism, to polytheism, and various forms of theism, only to return to pantheism again. It seems rather to move from a polytheism or crude animism to forms of theism, and finally to atheism. See Reza Azlan, God: A Human History (New York: Random House, 2017). Preceding this were books such as Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006); Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2009).
13. Susan Jacoby’s marvelous The Age of American Unreason of 2008 is now in its revised, second edition, The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies (New York: Vintage Books, 2018), a “must read.”
14. Jacques Barzun defines “decadence” as a “falling off.”
It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.
Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), p. xvi.
15. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Essays 1972–1980) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. chapter 1 on the contingency of language.
16. Dorothee Soelle, Choosing Life, tr. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981) and Political Theology: A Conversation with Rudolf Bultmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974). The former is directed more against consumerism and cynicism while the latter book is a “conversation” with Rudolf Bultmann, critiquing the excessive individualism of his theology.
17. Dawkins, The God Delusion. The “proofs” for the existence of God which he spends considerable time refuting, were actually refuted by Kant, but perhaps the latter’s method was admittedly too obtuse. His better book that religious people should read is The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2009).
18. Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
19. Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004).
20. As the Dalai Lama observed, then it becomes the unending question of “which religion.” It was this, among other reasons, that he articulated a nonreligious ethic even though he is certainly religious. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium, p. 26.
21. John C. Bennett, The Radical Imperative: From Theology to Social Ethics (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975).
22. If one looks at the rather unequal variety of “vices” Paul includes in his letters’ “vice lists,” one hears him say that, such people will never experience the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9) or that they “deserve to die” (Rom. 1:18-32), it is rather hard to take him seriously. That a “gossip’s” fate with God is the same as a murder’s? That envy is as immoral as theft or adultery?
23. See Masao Abe, “Buddhism,” in Our Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 119; Abe, “Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata,” in The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, ed. John Cobb and Christopher Ives (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1994), esp. 5–25.
24. One cannot help but think of Psalm 50 in which the writer seems more like a “reform” prophet than a priest as he belittles the people for their lack of morality while they are diligent in their “sacrifices” to God. So he has God saying, “I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds. . . . If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?” A little sarcastic humor?
25. I was educated as a theologian/philosopher of religion, and recall how in the late 1960s there were so many books being written about what a “theologian” could or should do—such as Fritz Buri’s little book on “speaking about God before God.” Running parallel was the concern about how the “word of man” becomes the “Word of God,” and the answers were quite imaginative from Barth forward. But it was a time when many felt challenged and important in having something to say about “God.”
26. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: University Books, 1963), pp. 506–12.
27. Ibid., pp. 506–512. “‘The truth of the matter can be put,’ says Leuba, ‘in this say: God is not known, he is not understood; he is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object to love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? Are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.’” (506–507) James is quoting Leuba, The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi, 536, July, 1901.
28. Ibid., p. 525—“All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary.”
29. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1926), p. 16.
30. But Whitehead does not seem to include those religious groups that feel it is, in fact, not a matter of “character,” but only of faith, which itself is even an act made possible only by “God” rather than oneself, and this “faith” simply suffices for “God” to change that “wrongness” of one’s life, at least forensically, if not actually, such as Lutheran Christianity and True Pure Land Buddhism with its “Nembutsu.”
31. See Frank E. Reynolds and David Tracy, eds., Myth and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). The elucidating and justifying tasks of a modern philosophy of religion is Tracy’s theme “On the Origin of the Philosophy of Religion: The Need for a New Narrative of its Founding,” pp. 11–36.
32. For example, Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 368, admitted that although emotions read in facial responses to pain, fear, and so on are similar across cultures, despite what some scholars have said (or even what the particular groups thought about their difference), the specific thing that their minds judge as pain or unacceptable or something as a “contaminant,” might be quite different from culture to culture. What Pinker seems to be pointing to is a very elementary intuition that humans have of what causes them pain or pleasure, the underlying categories of utilitarianism, an intuition that can be expanded greatly by the thinking process.
33. See note 31 above.
34. Thomas
