Icon Re: Ed, Sam, and Me (and Frank Turner, too)
H
heathcliffe (view)

"Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.”

The above is from the Amazon site Herring led me to. I've forgotten my quote inside a quote rule.

Science slowly and painstakingly seeks to explain those realities "for which there are no easy explanations."'

And each time it solves a mystery, religion loses that segment of faith that depended upon it. Was Newton, Galileo, Einstein, and now Hawking, a creator's gift to the created, a mind shared, doled out no faster than our capacity to understand. Or are they, each of them, simply a product of evolution, of a process by which the mind of Newton, say, contributes to later minds grappling to solve, as he did, religion-provoking mysteries and, at the same time, reduces the attraction to religion.

That "compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood"(or prison of selfhood)starts with: think of others as you would have them think of you, and liberates with "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Unfortunately religion often forms the basis for doing neither, for preaching evil differences, for doing it to others before they do it to you.

In the end religion will be looked upon as if it had been an onion with layers being peeled off one at a time by a peeler of scientific discovery.

For the "compassionate lifestyle" have there been minds, such as Aristotle's displayed in his Nicomachean Ethics or the writers of the Old Testament displayed in the Pentateuch that are products of evolution as cited above?

Are there moral laws, just as unrelenting as the Law of Gravity, to be "discovered" or will they prove to have been products of trial and error.
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