Richard Holloway reviews Roger Scruton's The Face of God:
He argues that, just as the human person disappears from the world when we look for the neurological explanation of his acts, so God disappears from the world when we hunt only for the cause and never for the reason of things … In religious discourse, we too quickly move from the illuminating suggestions of parable, metaphor and myth into quasi-scientific claims about the nature of the mystery that we are hunting. The irony here is that religions end up doing to the elusive person of God what biological determinism does to the elusive person of the human: they void it of mystery. This is why intransigents on both sides of the current debate about God increasingly sound like each other.
(Dew-soaked dandelions by Sharon Johnstone via Colossal)
The Dish 