Posts from — August 2009

How do you imagine heaven? Perhaps the traditional image is that of sitting on clouds, Yahweh or Allah or Zeus always being around the corner not having to explain the problem of evil, where you meet all your friends in life as well as those people you admired but never met—and generally a world in which everyone is as happy as they can be. People and religions vary in their conceptions of what this utopia is like. Some Hindus, for instance, believe that heaven is a place where you have none of your earthly desires. Muslims, on the other hand, see heaven as a place in which all your earthly desires are sated. But what is a perfect world, and is such a thing possible in principle, even if not in practice? [Read more →]

There are some words that must only be used delicately and infrequently, lest they lose their value. “Orwellian” is one such word. Whenever a Western government proposes a new policy that looks like the beginning of the road to totalitarianism, it is difficult to hear anything else. In Britain the Labour government’s proposals for ID cards are viewed with extreme suspicion (“they will know everything about us!”); in the US Obama’s policies on healthcare reform are met with much fearmongering and attendant fear; and in both cases Orwellian is the go-to word. But would Orwell be proud of this legacy? [Read more →]

The Big Three monotheistic religions (especially Judaism and Islam) make a point of instructing their adherents not to worship false idols or false gods. But does Yahweh/Allah expend his energies futilely?

Suppose I was an Israelite living at the time of Moses, and I worshipped a Golden Cow. Isn’t the name “Golden Cow” just another name for God (to me), just as Yahweh and Allah are different names for the same thing? Presumably God is jealous because he thinks that he should be getting the credit for Creation. But surely being jealous of a Golden Cow is only admitting the existence of a holy Golden Cow! Otherwise, he should hardly be angry with me: he should merely be telling me that he doesn’t look like that. But me being mistaken about his appearance should not be construed as blasphemy: if I am worshipping the Golden Cow, presumably I think he is great no matter what he looks like—and you can hardly ask for more respect than that.

If God expects his followers to worship him on the basis of the correct name and appearance, surely it is only courteous to introduce himself to them personally?

The idea of the canon, though innocuous enough to begin with, has been reappropriated on the one hand by apocalyptic cultural doom-mongers and on the other by cultural relativists. The debate, among those in academia, seems to be between two opposites, equally extreme: there either must be a canon and it must be defended, or there is no canon at all, and please just let us get on with reading whatever we want to read. [Read more →]