Sublime

In his book Bad Religion, writer and religious scholar Ross Douthat describes our New Age “God Within” theology as “a faith that’s at once cosmopolitan and comforting, promising all the pleasures of exoticism . . . without any of the pain . . . a mystical pantheism, in which God is an experience rather than a person. . . . It’s startling how little

We spend most of our lives as individuals pursuing our own interests. He called this the realm of the “profane,” which means the ordinary day-to-day world where we are very concerned about our own wealth, health, and reputation. But Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal practices for pulling people “up,” tempor

Cambridge University fellow Daniel Williams asserted that in a time when people choose beliefs and then look for rationalizations to support them, a marketplace for rationalizations emerges, “a social structure in which agents compete to produce justifications of widely desired beliefs.”93

What I wanted was the part where people were asked to get together once a week to talk about how to be a good person and, like, hang out with their neighbors. It’s pretty amazing that apparently the only way to get people to do that is to invent an all-seeing, kindhearted sky dad who will be super disappointed/burn you for eternity if you don’t sho

On the verge of disappearing, she turned, and she ran back to him. “Sam!” she said. “Do you still game?”