Making Sense of Religion
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Part V: Post Scatological Ruminations
Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso. Thanks to Dave Shack for sending the following quote by Frederick Buechner in response to my "House" post. I think it gets at Luther’s neither here nor there status of human beings very nicely: I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to
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Part IV: House, The Purgatorio Man
If you’ve been following the logic of the three preceding pieces on Original Sin, it should be clear that there is no necessary moral difference between being naughty or nice. Being nice means for the most part being well socialized, which has the moral equivalence of being potty trained. Being nice is what we are
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Part III: Ideas Matter
My goal in what I’ve written in the "Sinning Originally" pieces is not to argue for a position; it’s rather to describe the world as it appears from within the mental framework I have developed over the years. It contrasts dramatically with the mental framework of pagan naturalism, which has been the basic script governing
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Part II: Sinning Originally
Most educated people I know are uncomfortable with the idea of sin. They’re fairly sophisticated in their understanding of human psychology, and they recognize that people’s bad behavior is often rooted in childhood abuse or in chemical imbalances in the brain. Do these people who commit even the most heinous crimes choose to do evil,
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Part I: Sinning Originally
As an idea that lies at the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian narrative, original sin competes with other narratives, which for the sake of a short essay like this I’ll simplify into two categories: Eastern (as in Hindu & Buddhist) and Pagan (as in Greek, Germanic, and Celtic). All three basic narratives comprise many variations,