Natural Theology Book

One reason to keep reading is to find out where all the dead-ends are. If life is like a journey and each day is another step on the road, how can we be sure that we are not moving toward a dead-end? This is why a universal sweep, something often provided by well articulated maps, can help the wayfarer. If I know I'm on a road that leads nowhere then I can change course. Is this image too crude for you?

Kenneth Reinhard: Consider the possibility that the right road is life is learning how to love your neighbor. What are the names we give to those who find that impossible? Reinhard provides a few for our consideration: "psychosis" and "neurosis." To be psychotic means that one is not even walking down the road because the psychotic has no respect for calendared events. There is no common structure providing opportunities for shared experience. This "person" is not able to love his or her neighbor. To be neurotic is means to be captivated by one's own desire. That makes it impossible to actually listen to another person. If you can't actually listen to another person, you cannot love your neighbor.

Eric Santner: If daily life is like a chess match between you and a dwarf who pulls the levers, how is it possible to love your neighbor? The materiality of life cannot dominate the mind of the wayfarer, however much it is acknowledged. Materiality is a constraint. Those who see materiality in only its most obvious forms will fail to love his or her neighbor. Loving neighbors also means making it possible for them to see how their own energies can arrive at unknown destinies.

Slovj Zizek: If the point of life is to have a good time, to relax and live peacefully, to enjoy the flow of commodities, then we can't be so "intense" when it comes to others, especially our neighbor, now can we? The modern subjectivity of daily life is a "go with the flow," "it's all good," "I'm fine how about you?" (Perhaps the paradigm of modern subjectivity is the prisoner about to be executed by lethal injection. When the warden asks, "Do you have anything you'd like to say?" he says, "No, I'm good, let's get on with it." It's not the fearlessness, but the total disregard for subjective experience that I am calling out here) and other lies too numerous to expose at this point in our exposition. No, by all means, the fragile balance must be maintained. Coffee will be without caffeine, beer will have no alcohol, and when there's a war, there will not be any casualties.