Religion
-
I would not want to be reincarnated as a turtle. Not at all. Should it happen that I were to be reincarnated, I would prefer to return as one of those great sea birds — the Wandering Albatross or the Great Frigatebird or the Northern Fulmar — that cruise for hundreds of miles over the…
-
A friend is intimately acquainted with a primatologist. She (the primatologist) has spent many a year, almost a lifetime, studying baboons. She has lived with them and claims to have been accepted as one of the troop. She travels with them when she can. I'm impressed by her dedication. I wouldn't want to travel for…
-
Although my parents were pure and perfect atheists, they did not advertise their atheism or disparage the religions of others — at least not in my hearing. They were exactly the opposite of what is sometimes called "militant atheists." To be militant would have been to give religion too much regard, too much importance —…
-
In 1957 (I was 18 and in my second year in college), the reverend doctor Billy Graham led the largest revival meeting in history — an average attendance, in the old-old Madison Square Garden, of eighteen thousand people a night for three months. What was his message? It was half jingo, half Christian fundamentalism. "Let…
-
There are some words which one might read, study, and parse the dictionary definition and yet still not understand — words for which one has no intuitive or even rational conception. For example, there's the word "heaven." I know that "heaven" can mean "sky," a definition that poses no problem, but when "heaven" is presumed…
-
Shakespeare took a few shots at depicting a hellish afterlife. The most extended, if I remember correctly, belongs to Claudio in Measure for Measure. "To die, and go we know not where;/ To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;/ This sensible warm motion to become/ A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit/ To bathe…
-
Donald Trump has taken credit for the rise in the stock market. "The stock market hit yet another record high yesterday. There is great confidence in the moves that my Administration is making.” If he is responsible for the rise, then surely he is also responsible for the fall. It can be no accident, and can…
-
Dear grandchildren: I once asked my father, your great-grandfather Emanuel Pearlman, where in the Ukraine we originated. He said that he was told that it was a village called (and here he used a very deep guttural initial consonant) Xhosantin-gebernya – an answer that left me not much enlightened. If he knew more — and…
-
I'm devoutly secular, just as I was raised. Moreover, almost all of my friends are equally unreligious: either retired Catholics or atheist Jews or freethinkers or lapsed UU's or never-wases. I was therefore taken aback and a bit unsettled last week when at a friend and neighbor's dinner party, just as the guests were starting…