Animating spirit, first cause

13 Years Ago This Week

By Moristotle

[Published originally on September 27, 2009, the day after a walk with Ralph Earle, and republished in fond reminiscence of our conversation.]

A walk in the gentle woods of Hillsborough, North Carolina, yesterday prompted me to revisit what it is about “God” that I don’t believe. Not the walk, actually, but the conversation with my good friend Ralph, with whom I walked and talked. Ralph said two things that gave me pause. The first was that he finds it impossible to deny that God exists. While he is as clear as I am that “the Christian God,” as he puts it, does not exist, he says that God as the animating spirit of the universe, its first cause, does necessarily exist.

Easter Uprising

Spread the Word

A Parable

By Moristotle

God the Father’s people thank Him for resurrection.

His Son had been assailed with “Flog him!”

“Crown him with those thorns!” “Crucify him!”

“Nail his hands and feet!” “Mortify him!”

God‘s people kneel and worship Him for Jesus’ restoration.

Trump’s proud people stand by, they demand his restoration.

They’re very special people; he needs them.

They rally and smash her office; he loves them.

They storm the Capitol. “Get heavy!” “Trash them!”

“Make America great again.” They bring the pain of insurrection.

Copyright © 2021 by Moristotle

14 Years Ago Next Week: Monday Musings

I took this photo in the gardens
of the Rodin Museum in Paris
on April 27, 2016

By Moristotle

[Originally published on January 29, 2007, without an image.]

The other day I had occasion to share with someone something that I have thought for many years:

God [if God exists] can communicate with us any damn way God pleases [that is, through the Bible, the Quran..., the angelic kindness of a stranger...]

11 Years Ago Yesterday: Animating spirit, first cause

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 27, 2009.]

A walk in the gentle woods of Hillsborough, North Carolina yesterday prompted me to revisit what it is about “God” that I don’t believe. Not the walk, actually, but the conversation with my good friend Ralph, with whom I walked and talked. Ralph said two things that gave me pause. The first was that he finds it impossible to deny that God exists. While he is as clear as I am that “the Christian God,” as he puts it, does not exist, he says that God as the animating spirit of the universe, its first cause, does necessarily exist.

11 Years Ago Today: Compassion and Justice

[Originally published on September 1, 2009.]

An email discussion I’ve been having about health care reform with a small circle of Yale classmates recently put me in mind of something I’d read about the political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002). I’d read, perhaps in an obituary, that he held something like

14 Years Ago Today: Thanks be to God?

This seems timely

By Moristotle

[Originally published on July 23, 2006.]

This morning I linked to an old friend’s church website and read his most recent “letter from the pastor.” It ended with the words, “The wisdom of God surrounds us. Thanks be to God!”
    I share the belief that we are surrounded by and can participate in something we might call “God’s wisdom,” and I believe that gratitude (not taking good things for granted, but accounting them blessings) is a valuable attitude and makes a significant difference in the tone of a person’s life.
    But it seems to me that thanking GOD for things that make us glad implies reproaching God for things that make us mad...such as the fact that we have in our country today a pretend president who makes statements like

Goines On: Goines speaks to G

Click image for more vignettes

Goines’ heart sped up the morning he realized that he knew almost as much about his creator as his creator knew about him! Goines, a character in his creator’s fictional portrait, on a par with his creator!…So why had Goines been content to let the author lay out Goines’ thoughts and doings without Goines ever raising his hand to speak out to him?

The Loneliest Liberal:Putting reality TV aside

By James Knudsen

Before 2018 officially ended, I found myself writing a play, just sorta happened. It remains a work in progress, but how I wound up writing a play – which at the moment is still just a conversation between God (he's a she) and President Donald J. Trump – is something I’m still processing.

One Year Ago Today: Unique new evidence for divine intervention

Remember: “God” backwards spells “Dog”

By Moristotle

[The first official “poop patrol” report for the Collington Farms development in Mebane, North Carolina, was published on December 22, 2017. During the year ending today, Siegfried and I have collected approximately 1,144 piles of poop. The number is approximate because errors are inevitable, and it is occasionally unclear whether one pile resulted from only one poop, or whether two piles were produced by a single poop.]

By the half-way point of our walk this morning (about 3/4 of a mile into it), Siegfried and I had found (and I had collected) seven piles of poop (presumably dog poop). Hot damn! We had just tied the record set only a few days ago. It had more often been four or five piles, sometimes six.

Nine Years Ago Today: The Greatest Joke Ever Told

By Moristotle

[Originally published on August 22, 2009.]

Yesterday [nine years ago], in response to Steve’s comment [on “Ambrose Bierce on prayer”] that “[God] isn’t worth having a discussion over; waste of time and breath,” I commented that “on the contrary, it’s endlessly entertaining! Surely the biggest joke anyone ever told.” Being a slow-witted writer, I of course failed to take advantage of the opening to say instead, the greatest joke ever told. But it did put me in mind this morning (on my walk with Siegfried [then in his first year of life]) of the 1965 feature film directed by George Stevens and released by United Artists (after a lengthy pre-production period involving 20th Century Fox and a cast of characters almost as numerous as the credited actors).

The work of my lifetime

Christian Science 
as I see it

By Cynthia Barnett

Christian Science has been in my family for four generations, but I’ve always known it would have been the right religion for me even if I had not “inherited” it. I love Christian Science because it gives me a God I can accept from both reason and revelation. Relying on it all my life for guidance, comfort, inspiration, and healing, I have not been disappointed. It works.

Unique new evidence for divine intervention

Remember: “God” backwards spells “Dog”

By Moristotle

By the half-way point of our walk this morning (about 3/4 of a mile into it), Siegfried and I had found (and I had collected) seven piles of poop (presumably dog poop). Hot damn! We had just tied the record set only a few days ago. It had more often been four or five piles, sometimes six.

Reflections on personal values

By Moristotle

An entry in our back pages directory in sidebar caught my eye the other day, and I clicked on its New Ten Commandments link to revisit them and see whether I even remembered them. (When I formulated them, ten years ago, I hadn’t put up a stone monument of them in my front yard to remind me, and, even though I did inscribe them in my back pages, I don’t read them every Sunday, let alone every day.)

Eight Years Ago Today: Virtue its own reward

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 27, 2009, not one word different, but another image has been added and a different image of Spinoza substituted.]

Having learned a great deal from neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio’s 1999 book about consciousness, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, I decided to read another of his books.

Ten Years Ago Today

Even though...
still Nature....

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 30, 2007, not one word different.]

Even though violent men continue to murder people and blow things up in Iraq,
and even though the Bush Supreme Court continues to subvert our Constitution,
and even though Cheenie continues to insist he is a law unto himself,

Three Years Ago Today

A Christian-atheist conversation, Part 1: About animal rights

By Morris Dean 
& Kyle Garza

[Originally published on June 22, 2014, not one word different.]

Morris: In my Thor’s Day post of June 5 (“Value experience for its own sake: It’s an art”), I not only stated positively my view of the sacred art of living in a way that values life and respects one’s own and others’ experience for its own sake, but also outlined six areas in which I found the monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam wanting:

Ten Years Ago Today

Divine aporia

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 12, 2007, not one word different.]

I have long regretted that I didn’t study much classical rhetoric in college. My knowledge of technical terms in poetics and prosody has barely kept me afloat as I’ve tried to tread water reading literary essays and criticism. So my interest was piqued last October when a young Hollywood screenwriter [JD Payne] suggested I look at M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms. And I’ve since discovered Chapel Hill’s own English Professor William Harmon’s Handbook to Literature. Not bedside reading for everyone, but I delight in both books.

Carlin did Moses, Dawkins, and me eight better

Richard Dawkins

Revising the Ten Commandments

By Moristotle

[Author’s Note: Originally published on July 8, 2008.]

When I took Richard Dawkins up on his suggestion in The God Delusion that the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament needed updating to align them with the advances mankind has made in understanding what’s what (and what ought to be what), I rather slavishly followed him in retaining the number 10 when I developed “My ‘New Ten Commandments’.” Of course, he was only following Moses, so why not?

A history not of God, but of the idea of God

By Moristotle

[Originally published on March 19, 2008]

Karen Armstrong’s 1993 book, subtitled “The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” has the misleading but catchier title A History of God. She herself refers in the Introduction to “this history of the idea and experience of [emphasis mine] God in the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” [p. xix]. She admits that God might not really exist and that she wished, “when I was starting out in the religious life” [in the 1960’s], that she had been told to “deliberately create a sense of him for myself.”

Apotheosis

By Morris Dean

[Published originally on April 17, 2009.]

Funny thing. I don’t believe in god or heaven, but [on the morning of April 17, 2009] I was feeling so extraordinarily buoyant that, quite spontaneously, I exclaimed to my friend Jeff, “I feel so good—as though I’ve been apotheosized!” [The painting shown to the right is “The Apotheosis of St. Ignatius” by Giovanni Battista Baciccio (1639-1709). Ignatius is still, I suppose, believed by some to have been literally apotheosized after being killed by one or more lions for the entertainment of the citizens of Rome.]