Word: religion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sometime after the Enlightenment, science and religion came to a gentleman's agreement. Science was for the real world: machines, manufactured things, medicines, guns, moon rockets. Religion was for everything else, the immeasurable: morals, sacraments, poetry, insanity, death and some residual forms of politics and statesmanship. Religion became, in both senses of the word, immaterial. Science and religion were apples and oranges. So the pact said: render unto apples the things that are Caesar's, and unto oranges the things that are God's. Just as the Maya kept two calendars, one profane and one priestly...
This hostile distinction between religion and science has softened in the last third of the 20th century. Both religion and science have become self-consciously aware of their excesses, even of their capacity for evil. Now they find themselves jostled into a strange metaphysical intimacy. Perhaps the most extraordinary sign of that intimacy is what appears to be an agreement between religion and science about certain facts concerning the creation of the universe. It is the equivalent of the Montagues and Capulets collaborating on a baby shower...
...does the epigram, and the book emerges from Yeats, admixed with desire: desire, the force of the gyre spinning Malone and Sutherland and their coterie, binding them to the center till it scatters them like a merry-go round gone haywire; desire, the lesser mythology in the absence of religion, that turns the X's on a suicide note from crosses to kisses, and a night at Les Mouches to the Beatific Vision; desire, that which makes them dance...
...strong enough to say one thing and stand for one cause from the beginning. The people began to appreciate him, and now they glorify him. No one should rule out the possibility of chaos, but there is one element that makes me think that it can be avoided: our religion. This religion will keep people together in spite of the horrible things that have been done...
...that the measure does not cover. For example, the McRae plaintiffs argue that it would be "mandatory" for some Protestants and Jews to seek an abortion if they already had as many children as they could support. The suit further argues that the law represents an unconstitutional "establishment of religion," because it implicitly accepts the particular view of pro-life religious groups on the value of the human fetus and lacks the "secular purpose" the Supreme Court has required in such laws...