Lobstergirl’s Reviews > The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener > Status Update

Bertrand Russell: "Even when one feels nearest to other people, something in one seems obstinately to belong to God and to refuse to enter into any earthly communion – at least that is how I should express it if I thought there was a God. It is odd isn’t it? I care passionately for this world, and many things and people in it, and yet ….what is it all? There must be something more important.....

I never expected to hear Oral Roberts say anything I would find worth quoting, but on one of his 1992 television specials he surprised me. Speaking about irrational tragedies of the sort that seem so unnecessary, Roberts summed up all that a theist can say in one casual sentence: "God knows something you don't know."

No religious leader ever stressed more strongly than Jesus the interwoven doctrines of a personal God and a life beyond the grave. I find it an enormous scandal that Paul Tillich, who pretended to be a Protestant, would deny both doctrines.

Many good Christians who regularly thank God for more food than they need are the very persons who contribute to hunger in the poor nations by opposing the teaching of birth control methods that would slow population growth. In America the problem is not obtaining food but getting rid of it. I don't think God is in the least offended by a bathroom prayer of thanks for having an adequate bowel movement.

I was pleased to encounter many competent critics who share my low opinion of William Carlos Williams. Donald Davie, reviewing the first volume of Williams’s Collected Poems, ....opens with “Williams is the most embarrassing poet in the language, surpassing even Whitman.” David concludes that Williams was not consciously a con artist, but that “he was genuinely as simpleminded and as muddle-headed as he seemed.”

Yes, we philosophical theists are a lonely, fragmented breed. We are the closet theists. We can work for years alongside someone who will never suspect that we believe in God. We can even have wives or husbands, children and parents, who do not know what we believe. When we pray, we pray in secret, as Jesus himself (remember? Matthew 6:6) recommended.

Why have I written this book? Partly, of course, to get my own beliefs sorted out and down on paper, to find out what I myself, as I approach the end of my life, believe. But mainly I think I have written it for those who, like me, find themselves unchurched but still praying, still trusting in God, still hoping for another life.

There was a young man of Cadiz
Who inferred that life is what it is,
For he early had learnt,
If it were what it weren't,
It could not be that which it is.

Nothing seems ever to have mystified Dewey. Never, so far as I can recall, did he see anything tragic or comic or absurd about the human condition. We are all organisms interacting with our environment, and that's that. I suggest it is this almost total absence of a sense of mystery in Dewey, and a sense of the comic, that makes his writing so incredibly dull. Who can read him anymore?