I have decided to do with Hans Kung's little book Why I Am Still A Christian what I did with Walter Brueggemann's excellent small book The Bible Makes Sense and go through it over several weeks. I won't do what I'm tempted to, type the whole thing into Blogger, Kung's book being worth reading in its entirety. It isn't as comprehensive as the three longer books I've posted short excerpts from* but it makes a succinct form of the major arguments in those great works. Yet my stupidest troll slams the literature of theology which he has never, ever read a page of. Joined in that by the equally ignorant college-credentialed cohort I've mentioned otherwise today.
I might start today or tomorrow. Depending on an ever more busy calendar. I'm teaching again starting the end of this month.
* Does God Exist?, On Being A Christian and Eternal Life? You could spend a lifetime reading and rereading these books and looking up all of Kung's voluminous citations from all over the sciences, history, literature, philosophy and religion. I am unaware of anything in secular scholarship that matches them and, in fact, most of the theological works I've been reading. Once in a while I recall the passage from Richard Lewontin's essay-review, Billions and Billions of Demons in which he mocks the naive and arrogant pretensions of Carl Sagan:
Third, it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority
in science. The community of science is constantly self-critical, as
evidenced by the experience of university colloquia "in which the
speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into the talk before there are
devastating questions and comments from the audience." If Sagan really
wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he
should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in
an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn.
I adore Lewontin, that dear old atheist materialist, may he be glad when he discovers he was wrong. He should get into heaven on his honesty, if nothing else.
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