What Beyond Reason?
Robert B. Tapp
Reasoning is the most reliable guide to knowledge and thus to human actions. Our problems may be generated by dreams or dramas, but critical intelligence provides the best solutions, whether we are doing science or moralities. Reviews religious experiences, ecsttsies, and mysticisms—concluding that they remain, in final analysis, cognitively empty. We must become more specific with the possible meanings of such current cultural buzzwords as “spirituality.”
At the outset, let me state my conclusion: NOTHING. Many things can and do come before reason, and after it, and even alongside it, but nothing can or should replace it when humanists describe their ongoing criterion of action and reflection.
The choice of this topic for the Institute’s 1998 Faculty Colloquium was deliberate. Not only within contemporary Euroamerican culture but even within humanists’ groups there are calls for alternatives to reason. Intuition, feeling, impulse, spring readily to mind. Further toward the fringes of our society, one can find advocates of dreams, visions, religious experience, mystical experience, contacts with aliens, the dead, even spirit guides and gods and goddesses are proclaimed as sources of a superior knowledge. This is sometimes renamed “wisdom” to indicate a further elevation above ordinary knowledge. In current usage, these items and many more get lumped under “spirituality.”
In focusing on experiences as possible cognitive and epistemological sources, we are deliberately dismissing claims made for “revelations,” “sacred texts,” and “sacred persons.” The claims that groups of earlier humans have made here are simply too varied and too contradictory. One set can only be privileged by a purely arbitrary and purely parochial choice. Anthony Wallace once suggested that there had been 100,000 religions in history so far (surely a rounded estimate!). [1]
Let me start with a well-known example from India’s Sankara (788-829 C.E.). Walking down a jungle path, one sees a snake on the ground ahead. After a startled leap backward, one looks closer and sees that it is a vine. What was it (really) when one thought it a snake? The philosopher moved through a discussion of relativism to a nondualistic position in which everything was everything, and the knower and the known were one. This Vedantic Hindu worldview claims a higher wisdom that leaves behind any simple sensory empiricism or even any reflective analysis of experiences.
The Christian Fourth Gospel, tinged with neo-Platonisms, has its Christ declare that he is “one with the Father” and that those who are one with Him will therefore also be one with the Father. Some forms of Judaism have moved in this same direction, with relative freedom. Islam has not been quite so open. The mystic who declared his oneness with Allah, al Hallaj, was put to death in the tenth century, and subsequent Sufis have been more circumspect.
Those who have claimed such “ultimate wisdom” typically use the language of paradox and metaphor in describing their experiences to ordinary persons in the world. They have seen a “bright darkness,” a “filled emptiness,” a “world of fire,” a “burning fountain,” a “One without a Second (the literal meaning of Advaita).” A useful collection of such claims was made by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy.
Humanists must agree that these experiences, while fairly rare and infrequent even for those who claim them, seem eminently “satisfying.” Let us consider two aspects of this. Are such experiences precluded by our humanist stance; and what do they imply or mean? Julian Huxley, in 1952 at the founding of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, included an interesting agenda in his presidential address:
how can we help to promote the growth of rich and unified personalities, and to permit fulfilment in place of frustration? Is it possible to develop communicable techniques for attaining satisfying kinds of mystical experience, such as are recorded for Yoga, and to make them widely available, without impairing personality and without begging theological questions or professing particular theistic religions? Can we tap the reserve forces of the psyche that in most men lie latent; can we unlock the forces that in most men remain imprisoned in conflict? [2]
Indeed humans have such experiences, and clearly this distinguished humanist saw them as desirable. But do these experiences have any necessary cognitive, philosophical implications? I contend NO, and will be developing that more fully. The leap from experience to cognitive or epistemological statement is enormous. If we classify these as “high-mystical” experiences, the data from comparative mystical studies suggest a wide range of inferences have been drawn, from gods to voids, and all points in between. Put another way, the same experiences seem to occur in varied cognitive settings, meaning that no particular setting has any monopoly on the triggering. For our purposes here, it is important to situate the modern humanist more fully before discussing the experiences and their implications.
Situating the Modern Humanist
The development of the sciences since, say, Galileo, has regularized our cosmos. At the outset, it seemed that human reason, reflecting on sensory experiences, could perceive patterns capable of being expressed mathematically. This in turn built a predictability criterion into statements about nature that has held well for most of our experiences. It was called “verifiability,” but many have now adopted Karl Popper’s suggestion that “falsifiability” would be a more useful term to describe the nature and one of the limits of scientific knowledge. We never know whether tomorrow will overturn one of our claimed regularities, but each failure of falsification reduces the likelihood of this kind of overturn. Note, of course, that predictability is harder to establish outside of an experimental situations (e.g., a big bang, earthquakes, weather).
Darwin further modified this fairly simple understanding of scientific statement by linking together the physical and biological domains, and showing their operations within ecological (not his word, but certainly his meaning) niches. This introduced a heavy loading of “unpredictables” within evolutionary science. As George Gaylord Simpson was fond of saying, biological evolution is “postdictive” but not predictive. Many nineteenth-century philosophies of science had been quick to add several versions of “social evolution” to this already-heady mix.
This quickly lead to distinctions between the nomothetic (the lawful-regular earlier physical sciences) and the idiothetic (the unique, the singular, the historical). Much as the nineteenth-century historians saw themselves as doing “scientific history,” they were at the same time delineating the one-time event and its antecedents. Moreover, the event that they were attempting to re-present was both too complex and too not-in-the-present to permit adequate representation. In our day, we would want to allow for the inevitable biases of the historian in terms of race, class, gender, nationality, etc.
Further muddying the waters are the popularizers who see analogues between indeterminacy and quantum aspects of modern physics and such matters as history, which appears on a macro level with contours and regularities lacking at the particle level.
Our modern humanist sees the self in transactional terms, mediating between a physicochemical bodily structure and a physicochemical environment. In the human case (at least) this self is capable of restructuring, to a considerable extent, its larger environment as well as its own patterns. [3] This naturalistic humanist sees a continuum from waves and particles to galaxies in one sense and from cells to selves from another angle. Moving beyond this purely descriptive level, the humanist inherits and reevaluates a certain tradition which calls for a simultaneous developing of the self to its fullest along with the environing society of other selves along with the fullness of nonhuman life and nonliving nature. These traditions are best described in terms of valuations—high-level states that our humanist chooses and cherishes. Equality, dignity, justice, truth, beauty, morality, character, excellence, compassion, community, sensitivity—all have found their way into this humanist lexicon.
Note that this list, in philosophical jargon is normative rather than descriptive. These are “ought’s” rather than “is’s.” They are, indeed, the type of “values” proscribed by an earlier generation of logical positivists as “nonsense.” Were we to remain within that restrictive discourse, we would be reduced to being moral pollsters, resigned to describing some value as approved by certain percentages of a given population. Fortunately, this self-imposed constriction of some types of philosophy has receded.
Most modern humanists resonate with John Dewey’s instrumentalism, seeing values as “ends-in-view,” to be approached experimentally. Neither intent nor formal criteria are important; the stress is to be placed on the consequences of some particular action. Is this result desirable for me as well as for the rest of the human and non-human world? Is the requisite action possible? Are the outcomes reliable? Do they link with other “knowns” and thus expand the web of human knowledge?
Note that Dewey’s “action” involves real, embodied humans, not disembodied minds. And that his anti-dualism resists any real distinction between “mind” and “body.” We humans are purposive organisms, interacting with each other and with our varied environments; capable of making warranted assertions about each environment and capable of choosing among courses of action in terms of their consequences. Growth of selves in the sense of widening knowledge is thus also a growth within, and thus of, the natural world.
Reason in this sense is the testing of connections, the weighing of consequences, the removal of irrelevancies, and the comparative evaluation of possible actions in a problematic situation. Reason, or as pragmatism would prefer it, “reasoning,” occurs in a lived context and not in some realm of pure thought. As a human behavior, it is neither arcane nor convoluted. Subject to challenge by other reasoners, it is continually involved in self-corrections. Writing a paper such as this, for instance, one is continually weighing alternative topics, orderings, rhetorics, and strategies. None of those decisions are confined within the self. The reality of an intended audience shapes each, reminding us that our selves are irrevocably social selves.
Religious Experiences?
Throughout known histories, the vast majority of humans have described certain experiences which they have regarded as “religious.” Since almost all previous civilizations have had some forms of “religion,” this should be no surprise. These experiences have been described as awe, terror, fascination (Rudolf Otto), infinity (Schleiermacher), dependence (Ritschl), angst (Kierkegaard), unworthiness (St. Paul), gratitude (Luther), joy (Pascal), cosmic befriendedness (Browning), bliss (Wordsworth), longing (Francis Thompson), fear (Cicero), illusion (Freud), intellectual humbling (Job).
We have now sufficient comparative data to view these as potential human experiences that have historically unfolded in specific religious milieus. It is, therefore, not sufficient to term them “religious.” More specifically, they properly relate to Christian or Hindu or Jewish or some other specific tradition. In fact only in modern times has it become common to use “religion” as a genus of which particular religions are species.
Particular variations of particular religions have seized upon some experience as normative, encouraging their followers to encourage and build upon such experiences and to see them as confirmatory of some cosmic propositions. For instance, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” or “Those whom God loveth He chasteneth.” Think of the late Hebrew account of the suffering Job, whose logical questions were brushed aside by the Voice from the whirlwind (“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth”). The theological wisdom generated by these narratives: God’s ways are not man’s ways. In such cases, the emotional experience serves to rebuff and negate rationality.
The real questions, however, are whether a specific experience is desirable, how it is triggered, and what are its consequences (in terms of individual and social well-being). Earlier inquiries sought the causal agents (the matrix in which triggering could occur). Max Müller, for instance, saw many religious expressions as language mistakes (“Zeus is angry” as the explanation of thunder). Kierkegaard, taking the story of Abram and Isaac as cryptic but normative, concluded that there was sometimes a “teleological suspension of the ethical” (i.e. that Yahweh was not bound by ethics). Humanists view such privileging of an ancient legend as arbitrary, and the cultivating/acceptance of “fear and trembling” more neurotic than desirable. Viewing experiences in this secular fashion permits rational decisions as to their desirability.
Ecstasies
A special and intensive form of experience, often taken as religious and confirmative/cognitive, is ecstasy. Etymologically, the connotation is standing outside of oneself. Some recently-reported variations have been out-of-body and near-death experiences (OBE’s and NDE’s, to use the acronyms common in the literature). The intensity of these experiences necessitates this special section. An excellent mapping of these was done in 1961 by Marghanita Laski. [4] She based this on an examination of literary texts and her own questionnaire study. Of particular note is her discussion of the “overbeliefs” that ecstasies induce (Part 3). She notes that such experiences, relatively brief as well as rare in an individual’s life, are almost always seen as “highly if not supremely valuable.” But again, like the broader range of experiences that many would term “religious,” they are widespread and certainly not restricted to some particular religion. “Christian ecstasy” thus is human ecstasy labeled in terms of Christian overbelief. Her conclusion: “I do not believe that to seek a rational explanation of these experiences is in any way to denigrate them, but rather that a rational explanation may prove at least as awe-inspiring as earlier interpretations.” [5]
The occurrence of ecstasies, then, tells us much about the emotional potentials of the human animal, but nothing regarding the cosmic environment in which we live. Most religions have been at pains to distinguish sexual ecstasies from approved religious ecstasies. Exceptions would be some forms of Hasidic Judaism and Tantric Hinduism as well as occasional Protestant Christian utopianisms. A major contribution of the late and controversial analyst Wilhelm Reich was to show the ways in which authoritarianism structures (Christianity, Fascism, Communism) rejected sexual ecstasy as a pleasure available to citizens on their own, and thus subversive of their powers. [6] Beyond feelings of value and pleasure, there are no typical consequences to evaluate in the matter of ecstatic experiences, and certainly nothing to dethrone humanism’s designation of rationality as the ultimate touchstone.
Mysticism
Now we must turn to mysticism where the strongest claims for special knowledge have been made. Comparative mysticism has come into being in this century with such scholars as Evelyn Underhill, Rudolf Otto, Robert Bucke, William R. Inge, Rufus M. Jones, W. T. Stace, S. N. Dasgupta, Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan, G. G. Scholem, Robert C. Zaehner, Gerhardus van der Leeuw, Ninian Smart, Frits Staal. Even a slight acquaintance with some of these labors makes one thing clear. Mystical experiences are found throughout human history and are certainly not restricted to any religion or tradition. Some of these traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism) may be predominantly mystical while others (Islam, Protestant Christianity) are seldom so. But we are dealing with a human experience again rather than with one confined to some particular religion and therefore potentially confirmative of that religion’s truth-claims.
If ecstasies are rare and involuntary, mystical experiences are more often voluntary and very widespread. A project at Manchester College (Oxford) collected and categorized thousands of contemporary reports of mystical experiences. William McCready and Andrew Greeley, using extensive and sophisticated survey research techniques, assert that a majority of Americans have had some experiences which can properly be termed “mystical.” [7]
Different types of mysticism have been categorized: union/communion, dualistic/nondualistic. These have some correlations to religious families. Western religions have generally viewed their god as “other” and “transcendent” and therefore union claims have been suspect. The most notorious case is the aforementioned Sufi al-Hallaj who was dismembered, crucified, and burned to death for blasphemy in 922 C.E. for saying “I am Truth” since Truth is one of the names of Allah. For the most part, Western mystics have been content to use terms of “communion” to describe the relationship of individual to the god. Many, Teresa of Avila being the most famous, have used the metaphors of sexual congress to describe their moments.
Traditions stemming from India have been more open to the identification of self with “god,” developing linguistic categories to facilitate such claims. Atman (the Self/self) is identical to Brahman (the supreme reality, a neuter noun). At about the same time (6th century B.C.E.) Buddhists developed a dialectic of enlightenment claiming that the “self” was a fleeting, empty, and unnecessary concept as was “reality.” This made a “union” of the two possible. A similar negating/reversing is also found in some (Hindu and Buddhist) Tantric schools where a sexual ecstasy detached from all pleasurable feelings is the goal. In that same period, Jains developed an evolutionary atheism in which a higher principle (jiva, the living) was everywhere striving for liberation from an entangling lower principle (ajiva, the non-living).
This review of some varieties of mystical religiosity intends to show the determinative roles of conceptual, theological schema in guiding practice. Can we say that such practices have a common goal? Is this goal “cognitive?” Recall the popular saying in India: “All paths lead up to the top of the mountain; the important thing is to be moving on one of them.” But what is the view from the top? We must remember the etymology of mysticism. The ceremonies of Greek cults were mysterion, from myein, to close the eyes or lips, to initiate. In Sanskrit, the root mu- has to do with silence. Despite the volubility of most (i.e. most remembered) mystics, the result of the experience typifies what William James termed “ineffability.” In the Tao-te-ching, “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.” To be sure, James contended that mystical experience had a “noetic” quality, but this often simply refers to overwhelmingness.
In some sense, mysticism encompasses the previous two topics: it is indeed an experience, and it is indeed ecstatic. But does it tell us anything new about the self or the life and self-producing natural world? My present study of the mystics leads me to say NO. As a witness, I produce Swami Agehananda Bharati. Born in an assimilated Viennese Jewish family as Leopold Fischer, he was nevertheless pulled into the Nazi army, captured by the British in North Africa, and interned in India. This, serendipitously, allowed him to perfect the Sanskrit he had started before the war and be initiated as an orthodox Hindu sannyasi, ochre robe and all. After several years on pilgrimage, he described his transformations in a remarkably candid manner. [8] Next he was in the United States getting a doctorate in anthropology. Until his death, he flourished at Syracuse University. His Indological scholarship is immense. Of interest here is a book detailing some of his reflections on his life as a mystic in India.
Bharati flatly claims to have reached samadhi, the highest state of consciousness in India. Even more interesting, he terms it a “zero-experience,” void of any cognitive or intellectual content. [9] To what extent can this experience be described? Bharati asserts “All mystics feel the same—but they say different things.” [10] That is, they speak in terms of their local culture and traditions. These experiences come to all kinds of persons, including those who “prepare” for them with special disciplines. They do not, Bharati asserts, necessarily lead to life changes or moral shifts—a point he illustrates with numerous contemporary and historical examples.
He concludes that this experience will become more attractive in the “affluent, hedonistically liberal, increasingly de-dogmatized West” and that a rational mysticism might ensue:
A rational mysticism is not a contradiction in terms; it is a mysticism whose limits are set by reasons: a quest for the zero-experience without any concomitant claim to world knowledge, special wisdom, or special morality. These latter three must be directly generated by reason, and by reason only. [11]
In a strange way this resembles Julian Huxley’s call for naturalistic humanists to reexamine yoga and mystical systems as potentially desirable human experiences that have no necessary cosmic connotations.
Having now looked briefly at religious experiences, ecstasy, and mysticism—three of the putatively strongest claimants to knowledge/wisdom/insight that must be considered along with reason, let me now turn to that catch-all term of our day, spirituality.
Spirituality
Many of us exhibit allergy symptoms at this term. And with consider provocation and reason. The number one bestseller (“non-fiction”) is channeler James Van Praagh’s Talking to Heaven! A stroll through one of the book superstores shows shelves of “spirituality” plus yet more shelves of “alternative spirituality.” A much-heard phrase at all levels of US society is “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual.”
A recent commentator put it well:
What’s striking amid all this activity is the disconnect between what’s on TV and what’s in the culture. Scholars of religion tell us [that] Americans these days are spiritual seekers—”tourists with respect to the sacred,” in one famous formulation. We sample, we mix and match—it’s not unusual for an American to pray the rosary, wear a healing crystal, read Deepak Chopra and practice Buddhist chant.
Moreover, America’s questers come in all theological shapes and sizes. There are those who doubt, those who dissent and those who merely dabble, in addition to the “true believers.” [12]
Not surprisingly, this even shows up in the clothing that we are being induced to buy. A spokeswoman for Neiman Marcus, Beverly Morgan, noted that “with the millennium approaching, people are seeking solace in religion, spirituality, yoga and meditation” and because fashion designers are in the forefront of such a trend, patterns from Madonna (the contemporary one) to Buddha reign. [13] TIME LIFE Books has started a series on Living Wisdom, described as “The secret history of mankind’s search for spiritual truth, self-realization, and personal transcendence.” Unsurprisingly, the preview volume is entitled Sex & Spirit.
The author of another new book is described as a “medical intuitive,” and the same catalogue has books on spiritual healing of our pets. James Redfield hit the bestseller lists with a work of fiction (The Celestine Prophecy) which led to subsequent spiritual workbooks based on the prophecy. Most readers insist that Castañeda’s Don Juan is a historic personage rather than a fictional composite.
While I am reminded of Emerson’s rejection of Daniel Webster (“The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan”), I think a gentler approach may be in order. Just what does this or that neighbor mean by “spiritual?” Does it connote rarity, or depth, or mystery, or transcendence, or what? Until this can be determined, serious understanding or dialogue is impossible. A fascinating start on decoding some of this is in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion entitled “Religiousness and Spirituality: Unfuzzying the Fuzzy.” [14] The authors explored definitions of these terms with samples of 12 religious groups and asked respondents to rate themselves on each term. For all but one group, spirituality was rated higher. But the self-rating of religiousness was lowest for the New Age subsample, mental health workers, nontraditional Episcopalians, Unitarians, and mainstream college students. At the other end of the spectrum, Roman Catholics were the group where the self-ratings were identical. The moral? Never assume that you know definitionally or in advance what someone means by “spiritual.” Applying the same caveats that I used for religious experiences, there are no “spiritual” experiences; only experiences that individuals choose to elevate by the addition of that ambiguous adjective.
What have our own usages been? When the Unitarians and Universalists produced Hymns of the Spirit, they certainly were not referring to the third person of the Christian trinity! Nor was Yervant Krikorian when he edited the valuable Naturalism and the Human Spirit in 1944. Our varied traditions once used this word with considerable frequency and clarity to connote that part of the human that could soar, that could transcend the limitations of the present in creative moments. We would do well to recall Ludwig Feuerbach’s insight that the alleged attributes of deity are projections of our best attributes and values. Periodically coupling “human” with “spirit” serves us well. That way we start with the more-or-less known and move outward. If we use terms like wonder, depth, mystery, we are referring to some “not yet” and not some “never here.” Concepts such as “authenticity,” “creativity,” “self-actualization,” “maturity” come to mind. All of these lend specificity to the otherwise-vague umbrella-term spirituality. Or (I can seldom write on this without a bow toward John Dewey) why not compare spirituality and spiritual to religion and religious? Avoid those nouns; they suggest static reifications. Stress instead the attitudinal and active. Try to understand “religioning” and “spiritualizing” and “sacralizing.” And remember, Emerson did not cease speaking of liberty because of Daniel Webster!
Nontheistic humanists may prefer not to engage in god-talk themselves but they would be foolish to fail to appreciate the deep human needs from which it springs within most of our neighbors. Whether humanism can or should satisfy any or all of such needs is part of the question; the other part is which needs will have to be transcended if human maturity is to occur.
I am urging us here to recapture and re-precision some of the poetic language that once moved us: soul, spirit, heart, guts, perfectibility, progress, evolution, love, truth, universality, justice, goodness, excellence, maturity, dignity, worth. A rhetoric that moves people will pile metaphor upon metaphor. Well and good, if we remember that effective metaphor must start from something concrete. And there resides the humanist difference. In a recent paper Billy Graham, citing Jesus and referring to President Clinton, claims that it is equally sinful to think about something and to do it! This either makes “sin” inevitable or so universal that calling it sin is gratuitous. Theodore Parker, gibing an earlier Calvinist divine, said he didn’t understand anything about such a pervasive “original sin,” but did know a number of quite specific sins. That kind of concreteness makes ideas and concepts come alive, become singable and danceable and memorable.
Conclusion
Now surely human lives consist of multitudes of feelings and knowings and valuings. Humanists would insist that these are indeed real and empirical. The problem is in ranking and choosing among them. And in deciding which are appropriate in which contexts. Stages of life are one such context. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the great Anglo-Indian art historian, liked to say that Puritanism was the attempt of the older to impose their values on the younger! Feelings and knowings and valuings are clearly relative—to age and class and race and gender and subculture (even granting that almost all of such conceptualizations are socially constructed).
Our moral dilemmas are seldom between polar extremes. More often we are asked to choose between relative goods. Recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s student who needed advice on whether to remain as caretaker of his sick mother or join the Resistance. Or Andre Trocme, Huguenot pastor in wartime France, choosing between being honest with the Gestapo at the door or protecting the life of the Jewish refugee hidden in the basement. No textbook ethics covers such situations. Certainly the most available of Paul Tillich’s works is Love, Power, and Justice where he describes the inevitable tensions among these high values. Should the love that one feels for a friend who has committed a crime be permitted to outweigh the importance of justice?
Naming such values, of course, is only the beginning. We need to become specific about their operations, particularly their consequences—for agents and societies. In contemporary ethics, society can be no less than the total human community. And community lives in and on nature. These responsibilities—to self, to others, to our shared environment; to the past and to futures—remind us of the central and inevitable role of reasoning. Or, in the presumed words of Aristotle’s lost Protrepticus, “Whether or not we are to philosophize, we must philosophize!” For humanists, surrounded by those who call ours a postmodern period, reason remains the supreme commitment. We are indeed inheritors of the Enlightenment and its modernist flowerings. But we defend reason best by exhibiting it.
[*] An earlier version will appear in Free Inquiry 20.1 (Winter 2000).
[1] Religion; An Anthropological View (New York: Random House, 1966).
[2] “Presidential Address: Evolutionary Humanism” in Proceedings of the First International Congress on Humanism and Ethical Culture (Utrecht: Humanistisch Verbond:1953), 20.
[3] This not the occasion to visit attempts to differentiate this into self/Self, conscious/unconscious, proprium/body, personality/character or many of the oher attempts to recognize levels in what we are simply, in some functional rather than substantial level, calling a “self.”
[4] Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences. Reprinted, (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1990).
[5] Ibid., 374.
[6] The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 3rd. ed., rev. & enl. (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946) and The Function of the Orgasm (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1973).
[7] The Ultimate Values of the American Population (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976).
[8] Cf. The Ochre Robe (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961).
[9] The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext in Modern Mysticism (Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1976), 48.
[10] Ibid., 661.
[11] Ibid., 234.
[12] John L. Allen, Jr. “With religion, TV misses the big picture.” National Catholic Reporter (Mar 20, 1998), 3.
[13] Barbara De Witt, Los Angeles Daily News, reprinted in Minneapolis Star Tribune (Mar. 15, 1998).
[14] 36:4 (Dec 1977), 549-64.
© 1999 by the North American Committee for Humanism (NACH) All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form, including electronic media, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
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