A Sound of Sheer Silence

So, I thought that was now going to turn to discussions of God, but I think there is something else that is worth getting out of the way from the beginning, and that is what it means to "believe" in God or some faith tradition, and how one goes about doing that.  In other words, what it means to have faith.  Because I think there is a fundamental divide here in the way this is presented, a divide that is not between people who believe and people that don't, but between one of sort of believers (and, somewhat ironically, the most vocal critics of those same folks from the non-believer side) and another. On one presentation, faith is something that is fundamentally alien to all other aspects of the human experience.  It is not something that we reason toward, and it is not based on our normal encounters with people or objects.  Instead, it comes from "outside" of us and imposes some sort of new reality on our otherwise mundane experiences.  Basically, we are going...

Statistics tell us that we in the United States are approaching the point at which a majority of people do not consider themselves "religious."   Western Europe reached that point a while ago.  But behind those statistics is the question of what the survey recipients might mean by "religious" or "religion."  The popular understanding of this word, an understanding that I think is shared by both the folks who consider themselves religious as well as those who don't, is that religion has to do with an identification with a particular institution or tradition that is organized around transcendent questions and/or the engagement with a set of practices that have something to do with those transcendent practices.  So, one is religious if one identifies oneself with The Episcopal Church, or the Independent Fundamental Baptist Church, or Reform Judaism, or Baha'i, or engages in practices that are associated with one of those entities, or (more likely) bot...