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Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.
The fourth-century bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: “Jesus Christ was incarnate so we could be made God”
That fusion is called theosis. The human nature of Christ makes the divine possible for all of us.
he has never read Frédéric Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshott, John Gray, Ammianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadia Gaon, or Joseph de Maistre;
If anything, being rich you need to hide your money if you want to have what I call friends. This may be known; what is less obvious is that you may also need to hide your erudition and learning. People can only be social friends if they don’t try to upstage or outsmart one another.
Love without sacrifice is theft (Procrustes). This applies to any form of love, particularly the love of God.
Three rigorous thinkers (and their schools) orient my thinking on the matter: the cognitive scientist and polymath Herb Simon, who pioneered artificial intelligence; the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer; and the mathematician, logician, and decision theorist Ken Binmore, who spent his life formulating the logical foundations of rationality.
Judging people by their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as the “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations.
While the notions of “reason” and “reasonable” were present in ancient thought, mostly embedded in the notion of precaution, or sophrosyne, this modern idea of “rationality” and “rational decision making” was born in the aftermath of Max Weber,
Ethics: A Very Short Introduction
