A Brief Homily on Our Neuropsychological Existence
“If the whole universe can be found in our own body and mind, this is where we need to make our inquires. We all have the answers within ourselves, we just have not got in touch with them yet. The potential of finding the truth within requires faith in ourselves.”
Looking Back on 115 Essays and a Lifetime Besides
“A religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in; and if any sceptic forgets it, the maddest fanatic beating an Orange drum about the Battle of the Boyne is a better philosopher than he.”
The lion’s share of…
Reappraising an Obscure Mormon Doctrine
“When Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham … from the words that Abraham himself wrote 4000 years ago, important information about the cosmos was revealed that had not been known before.
“Anciently, Abraham looked through a Urim and Thummim … to learn about the sun, the moon, and the…
A Young Mormon Reads Watts in Provo
From 2015 to 2016, when I lived in Provo (and at one point was attending BYU), almost everyday I would walk from my apartment just off West Bulldog to campus, and stop at the Joseph F. Smith Building. …
On Sacred Theater and Divine Therapy
“Now it is this detour through the kingdom of as-if … We bracket our religious beliefs (provisionally at least) on entering the theater, in order to be able to believe in the theatrical make-believe. This, as I read it, is an … agnostic liberty to explore all kinds of different…
On the Messiah Who Has Always Already Come
Throughout the New Testament a certain theme persists: that tension between the Kingdom of God as a reality yet to come and the Kingdom of God as present here and now. Perhaps this is due in part to the expectations of the historical Jesus, or at least his followers, that…
A Note on Myopia
“William James observed that wisdom was learning what to overlook. Prince Hamlet is the most intelligent of literary characters, but by James’s pragmatic test the doom-eager Shakespearean charismatic is anything but wise. …
Notes on Wholeness and Evil
“…although the attributes of Christ … undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except…
On Knowing Nothing
I would like to bear my testimony that I do not know a thing.
Our best understandings of God are idols which must be destroyed before we can encounter God.
To borrow from the first shahada of Islam’s first pillar, “lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh”— “there is no God but God.” …
Notes on Various Kinds of Mormonism
“Why then do you marvel at the resurrection of Jesus? What is marvelous is not that he arose but that he did not arise alone, that he raised many other dead ones who appeared to many in Jerusalem.”
— Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate) 17:1 (c. 600s)
“… if…
Nathan Smith
Independent writer from Austin, TX writing on psychology, philosophy, literature, religion. www.nathansmithbooks.com @NateSmithSNF
