Category: Religion
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On the Misuse of ‘Theology’
This is an addendum to my post, On the Misuse of Religious Language. In the left-wing rag of record, the NYT, we find: “When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in…
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On the Misuse of Religious Language
A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of…
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A Bad Reason for Thinking that Atheism is not a Religion
Atheism is not a religion. But the following is not a good reason for thinking so: Atheism (and here I mean the so-called “weak atheism” that does not claim proof that god does not exist), is just the lack of god-belief – nothing more and nothing less. And as someone once said, if atheism is…
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Whether Atheism is a Religion
I have been objecting to the calling of leftism a religion. Curiously, some people call atheism a religion. I object to that too. The question as to what religion is is not at all easy to answer. It is not even clear that the question makes sense. For when you ask 'What is religion?' you…
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Is Islam a Religion? Buddhism?
Claude Boisson writes, Given your criterion 3 for an ideology to be a religious doctrine, it is doubtful that Islam could be viewed as a religion (it is also a socio-political system with a supremacist agenda, but that is another matter). In Islam, man can err, has to be obedient to Allah, but man…
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Progressivism and Religion Again
Malcolm Pollack writes, Saw your post today. I really do think that modern Leftism is best understood as a religion. I realize also that understanding something as if it were a religion is different from saying it is a religion, and so I've just written a response to your post, in which I try to make…
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Is Leftism a Religion?
Via Malcolm Pollack, I came to an essay by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar in which surprising claims are made with which Pollack agrees but I don't. Deresiewicz: Selective private colleges have become religious schools. [Emphasis added.] The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system…
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The Pious Pyrrhonian: Is Beliefless Piety Possible?
Is it possible to be a religiously pious Pyrrhonian? The Pyrrhonian skeptic, aspiring to tranquillity of mind, tries to live without beliefs. These of course include religious beliefs which are a prime cause of bitter and sometimes bloody contention. So one might think that a skeptic of the stripe of Sextus would have nothing to…
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Religious Reciprocity
I don't imagine that Mr. Trump or any of his staff read this weblog, but I have an idea for him. He ought to announce a moratorium on the building of mosques in the USA until such time as Muslim states permit the building of churches, synagogues, ashrams, and zendos in their lands. Does that…
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Is Islam an Abrahamic Religion?
Howard Kainz
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Why Did Trump Get the Religious Vote?
After all, no one would confuse Trump with a religious man. Robert Tracinski's explanation strikes me as correct: The strength of the religious vote for Trump initially mystified me, until I remembered the ferocity of the Left’s assault on religious believers in the past few years—the way they were hounded and vilified for continuing to…
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Intimations of Elsewhere Dismissed
A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience. He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling. He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird…
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Two Different Christmas Day Meditations on the Incarnation
Last Year's: "And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us" (John 1:14) Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born…
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Searle on Religion
For some religion is too good to be true. For others it would be awful if true. And then there are the indifferent for whom religion is simply not an issue. Among the latter are those who consider talk of religion to be in bad taste in polite society. In Mind, Language and Society,…