more life

Very interesting post from Rabbi Rami, responding to the question Why do I talk so much about God? He writes: "'God' is just a word. For me it isn’t a matter of true or untrue, it is a matter of useful or unuseful."


So, with this view the Rabbi may be a kind of pragmatist or even Deweyan. In John Dewey's "A Common Faith," the word God names an active human will to close the gap between present reality and the envisioned attainment of our highest ideals. I prefer that to John Lennon's "God is a concept by which we measure our pain," but that view too can be useful. 


The Deweyan attitude seems less fatalistic, less stoically resigned than Lennon's (though in retrospect you'd have to say his fatalism was perfectly prescient). 


But it's also less reckless than William James's variety of pragmatism, insofar as being useful or not is still kept separate from the "matter of being true or untrue." 


I like William James's philosophy a lot, though I don't always share it. But I do share this view: "Not God but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is the end of religion." Shouldn't that be the point of living, period?