Miracles
I tend to have problems discussing religion and spirituality with most people. Those who have grown up religious and either view it as a Sunday morning meeting or an absolute truth are often disinterested or offended by my perspectives. Those in the growing atheist/rationalist/humanist movement all too often are solely intent on explaining the absurdities of conventional and fundamentalist religious traditions ad nauseum.
I am not sure how Miracles: A Preliminary Study by C.S. Lewis ended up on my book shelf, but I found it a short time ago, and have been slowly reading the first non-fiction book by the author I have encountered. I love it. I am not Christian, but I find Mr. Lewis's observations and insights quite relevant regardless of specific religious or spiritual tradition.
I won't go on and on about the particulars, I figure that if you are interested in theology or religions or philosophy that you will simply go read the book and develop your own opinion. I will, however, leave you with a short section that brought a smile to my face. Note that, in my opinion, the word Christianity below could be replaced by any religious or spiritual tradition or pursuit.
"It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which comes upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience."
I am not sure how Miracles: A Preliminary Study by C.S. Lewis ended up on my book shelf, but I found it a short time ago, and have been slowly reading the first non-fiction book by the author I have encountered. I love it. I am not Christian, but I find Mr. Lewis's observations and insights quite relevant regardless of specific religious or spiritual tradition.
I won't go on and on about the particulars, I figure that if you are interested in theology or religions or philosophy that you will simply go read the book and develop your own opinion. I will, however, leave you with a short section that brought a smile to my face. Note that, in my opinion, the word Christianity below could be replaced by any religious or spiritual tradition or pursuit.
"It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which comes upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience."