Book review in New York Times today of In the Valley of the Shadow by James Kugel. He is a Hebrew Bible scholar at Harvard, diagnosed with cancer some years ago, lived, and is now 61. His new book sounds interesting and he wonders if the recent books and ideas about disproving God and religious belief lack an understanding of what it is and feels like to have a religious or spiritual sense of life, intimations of God or something more. He understands that a sense of God can be triggered by stimulating the "God Spot" in the brain (much like some epileptic seizures - especially temporal lobe epilepsy). But he goes on "or you could call the epileptic's aura a privileged moment, an opening of the mind to something it cannot normally perceive."
And later: "The most fundamental element of religious belief........ it is not God's sovereignty over the entire universe that is at issue so much as his sovereignty over the cubic centimeter of space that sits just in front of our own noses." The same ideas so many of us have been batting around for so many years.
