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Driving off in the car

"At the end of our books about God, those of us who are not Kantians will discuss how it is that we human beings can think and speak about God. That for us is an important matter of intellectual curiosity, But it is not a matter of agony. We empathize with those who experience the Kantian agony; but we do not share it. If one believes that one's car is in good working order, one does not spend the whole day under the hood to determine whether it could possibly be in good working order, and if so how." So wrote Nicholas P. Woltenstorff, at the end of his essay "Conundrums of Kants' Rational Religion (1991). That was a contribution to an anthology -- I won't give you the title of the full book, just to give you a job to do. The metaphor of driving a car here here refers to the fact of having and discussing ideas about God, such as "God's grace is necessary for salvation." Kant had such ideas, and expressed them in some of his writings that p...

Dog People and Cat People

Humans love cats in large part because of their innate grace, because from the time they are kittens they already seem to know how to move, how to make the best use of the space around them. Humans also love dogs, in large part I submit because of their acquired grace, because when they are puppies we can often see that they are clumsy, that they charmingly bumble about in space. Note the troubles of the fellow shown here. We love dogs because we can see them learning to be graceful as they grow. Humans become "cat people" or "dog people" depending on which sort of grace we find most appealing, the innate or the acquired.