While the home of the American Empire is consumed in flames, Mr. Ganesh entertains his readers with ‘God Talk’. In that spirit let me offer these thoughts:

Janan Ganesh celebrates Francis Collins by way of Christopher Hitchens ‘the heathen’s heathen’ praise for Collins. There can be no real rapprochement between Science and Religion: Belief and Empiricism are antithetical concepts, even ways of thinking and imagining. But propagandists, who happen to be acolytes of Christianity, like Francis Collins, feel it incumbent upon themselves to attempt to bridge this chasm.       

As a child who came of age in the 1950’s in America, you could have thought that Billy Graham, or the more high-brow Reinhold Niebuhr, could render that chasm bridgeable. Even though you found the enervating, not to speak of jejune chatter of Christianity’s proselytizers unpalatable…

(The TV preachers who replaced this duo were/are just Grifters running the con!) The once celebrated Harvey Cox is where? I spent too much time, in my childhood, attending Sunday School, Youth Night and Vacation Bible school, having to pay attention to adults’ drone on about, first Sin, then about Jesus! First shaming ,then redemption! 

Now the self-obsessed Kierkegaard tried, by of his advocacy of his own Augustinian Temperament, in sum self-loathing for being human, has become the sine qua non of the true belief and practice. To establish irrationality as singularity. This irrationalism appealed to Heidegger, later in his philosophical maturation, if that is the correct descriptor?

See Karl Barth’s commentary on ‘The Epistles to the Romans’ for the demonstration of the hermetic character of ‘Faith’, equal to intellectual/ethical suffocation! Barth repeats this theme, in endless iterations, with abundant Biblical garnish.

I read a slim volume of John Polkinghorne , the title of which escapes my memory, and found it disappointing, in that it was a repetition of the Christian Fundamentalist Party Line. What I really enjoyed reading, that was illuminating, by its focus on Kant, was Christopher J. Insole’s ‘The Intolerable God: Kant’s Theological Journey’

https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/7305/the-intolerable-god.aspx

Queer Atheist 

https://www.ft.com/content/3f301c1a-a0c3-11ea-b65d-489c67b0d85d