Roberto Colasso tagged posts

God and the gods: From Colton Burpo to Roberto Calasso

There may yet come a time when human beings inhabit distant planets in colossal, antiseptic spaceships, going about their days with antiseptic, computer-controlled minds, from which all notions and needs for God-talk will have been expunged. But until that day comes (not in my lifetime, thankfully), I’m casting the time and attention I have left to give on this earth with the poet Ezra Pound: “No apter metaphor having been found for certain emotional colours, I assert that the Gods exist.”

And so they do, in such an astonishing array of forms, depths, beliefs and disbeliefs as to challenge the very notion of human beings even resembling a coherent, more-similar-than-not species.

Exhibits A and B in that challenge: Colton Burpo and Roberto Calasso.

Burpo is the now teen-aged youth who purportedly went to heaven during an emergency appendectomy when he was four years old...

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