The too-casual use of "civic religion"

Obama can't even be totally blame-free on this.

Very interesting, noting that civic religion often invokes what really is pure, dumb luck, but noting that nobody wants to actually put it that way.

In talking about theodicy and this issue, James Wood notes:

Either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.

Or god, at least as many people see him, doesn't exist.

The emotional power of how theodicy undermines the Western Judeo-Islamo-Christian all-powerful deity was as powerful for me, if not more so, than intellectual arguments.

Unfortunately, somebody as smart as Barack Obama doesn't think that through.

Rightly did Hume say, in light of things like this, that reason is the slave of the passions.