Persnickety

I of late have attended, much to my dismay, a Bible study. Not a mere discussion of the Bible but one formed around fundamentalist doctrine. Of a sort. The study was basically independent of leadership, which is to say it had no church leader leading the group around some central theme or book (other than The Holy Bible itself), as is the norm in such things. I was intrigued because the instigator of the group titled it An Inquiry into the Bible. That was intriguing since I welcome such inquiries. There are, to my mind, too many "certainties" around the biblical Word. Some questioning is very much welcome in my world. We began with Genesis. It began quite slowly. We could not make a lot of headway past the first two verses. The idea of a "Gap Theory" loomed and this lead to a discussion on how old the earth was (between 5,000 and 8,000 years old). Evolution crept in, but only to be dismissed as an example of what is wrong with the teaching within our public s...

After some deliberation, when I wondered if I actually meant The Poetry of Religion, I've settled on things as they currently rest. "The Poetry of Religion" would emphasize the endpoint of religion, presumably with its different categorizes of doctrine and spiritual subjectivity, even myth. It states that poetry is a way of seeing religion, a way of describing it, experiencing it. That isn't the way that I think religion works at all. Rather, it is the poetry that we experience, not the religion. It is more correct to say that we form our religions out of poetry, not the poetry from the our religion. Poetry has, at least within the English-speaking world where I reside, hit upon tough times. Virtually no one reads poetry anymore, other than a few serious practitioners (it is true, though, that many do write poetry but few of them take it so seriously as to study it, revere it, and take it into themselves as mental food). It isn't strange then to conclude that fe...