Ethical Musings

Painting of God in the  Sistine Chapel at the Vatican An Ethical Musings’ reader has asked me to elucidate my understanding / definition of God. She cited a statement in a recent Ethical Musings post as an example of how I understand or define God: “God (the energy, light, love, etc., which permeates all existence).” In her email she also quoted another cleric’s definition of God as “Ultimate Reality,” a phrasing that I sometimes use.She finds those definitions overly vague. She’s also troubled by frequently hearing sermons that suggest God is someone who "loves us", "cares", etc. She wonders how energy, light, or ultimate reality can "love" or "care"? She’s also concerned that characterizing God's actions as loving or caring anthropomorphize God, i.e., attribute human traits or characteristics to God, perhaps most infamously imagining God as a big old man perched on a cloud.Answering her questions requires disentangling several theological is…

The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disease (PTSD) in the military began with pre-twentieth century militaries executing soldiers who suffered from PTSD as deserters. In World War I, the terminology gradually shifted to “shell shock.” In World War II, Sir Charles Moran, Winston Churchill’s military physician proposed individuals had a supply of courage that, once exhausted, left a soldier psychologically incapacitated. By the end of WWII, the U.S. Army concluded:The army’s experience with psychoneurosis during the war had led it to two sobering conclusions. The first was that even the most psychologically healthy men would almost inevitably break down after long-term exposure to the horrors of modern battle. An investigation by the army’s surgeon general’s office in 1945 concluded that six months of continuous fighting was the maximum that even the “sturdiest and most stable soldier” could endure without breaking. That is, the process of psychological breakdown was actually a norma…