"Of all the questions you might want to ask / about angels, the only one you ever hear / is how many can dance on the head of a pin." -- Billy Collins, bio {Others' quotes}

4.06.2011

"The Evolution Of God" -- Book Review

In "The Evolution of God," Robert Wright writes that God got more civil as civilization did, or in the words of the 2009 reviewer of the book, "God grew up."
... the increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species. “As the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.” Wright argues that each of the major Abrahamic faiths has been forced toward moral growth as it found itself interacting with other faiths on a multinational level, and that this expansion of the moral imagination reflects “a higher purpose, a transcendent moral order.”
Wright tracks the conception of the divine, not the divine itself. He describes that as “a good news/bad news joke for traditionalist Christians, Muslims and Jews.” The bad news is that your God was born imperfect. The good news is that he doesn’t really exist.


SOURCE: by Paul Bloom in the NYTimes, 7/09

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