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Showing posts from September, 2013

What a theological noncognitivist can say

Imagine a community called Storyville, where there are no religious institutions per se, but where various stories are circulated which we would call "religious."  Let's say these are stories from the Bible, such as the story of Job.  In Storyville, the questions might arise:  Are these stories based on facts?  Do they represent some features of the world or our history?  Does the character of Job represent a real person who lived some time in the past?  Does the character of God represent a real person who lived in the past? A denizen of Storyville might respond, "Job may have been a real person, but what sort of person could God have been?  I don't think God sounds like a person at all.  Is God supposed to represent some abstract quality or force of nature?  Maybe God is supposed to be both:  a person, but also some other kind of force of nature, or some quality inherent in nature.  It doesn't seem to make sense, but it's just a story, so it doesn&#