Dennis Miller and the God Question

My book, The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder, deals directly with the below issues in Chapters 12 and 13, which focus on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (link to free online version). 

I recommend that anyone interested read my book as a primer, then read Zen and the Art, which is quite a long book, well worth reading, but you have to know what you're looking for and how it all fits together.

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Below is a short audio clip of an Interview from The Dennis Miller Show. Dennis is interviewing Vince Bugliosi, author of Divinity of Doubt: The God Question (as well as Helter Skelter, and others), a book in which Bugliosi intellectualizes many tenets of Christian faith, like virgin birth, immortality of the soul, the divinity of Jesus and others.

In the interview, Bugliosi says that he is an agnostic, and that atheism is an "intellectually empty philosophy. Says Bugliosi of popular atheists like Christopher Hitchens, who he names specifically, "They simply cannot find a non-sequitur that they do not like."

But like such atheists (and religious folk from the opposite side), Bugliosi sets up these straw man intellectual arguments which do not advance the debate at all, but rather simply further obscure the basic difference between religious/spiritual people and intellectual people, which is a PHILOSOPHICAL difference concerning the nature of reality.

This sounds quite esoteric, but let's make it very, very simple:

Are College Women Coming Around to Catholic View on Contraception?

This article was first published by Technorati on 11 March 2010. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

New research suggests that the vast majority of Americans (82%) believe God helps them make personal decisions. Does that include decisions about sex?

At first blush, one might think that a heightened sense of spirituality in an individual would lead to less frequent sexual activity, but researchers at the University of Kentucky (my alma mater) say that isn't the case.

The study in question distinguished religiousness from spirituality and found that the latter was actually a predictor in the other direction.

Make No Progress Today

"Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it," is a pretty famous line from the Bible, the book of Psalms to be exact. It was written by a famous wise man, King Solomon, of "split the baby" fame.

The Bible is chockfull of wisdom, without doubt. But I'm much more comfortable these days quoting a line from the Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (Perennial Classics) than I am quoting from the Bible (though I know it very well) because so much of what is said about the Bible is sectarian; that is, religion in service to the ego, as Eckhart Tolle puts it in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61).