Believe it or not, my beef is not with faith, but with reason. ("You think faith is unreasonable?" I read somewhere recently - "What makes you so sure reason is reasonable?"). The big discovery of the seventeenth century, Reason was (and incredibly, still is) billed as the Last Best Thing, meant to lead us out of Middle Ageian darkness into a state of earthly perfection. More than 400 years later, where are we? Out of the Middle Ages and technologically very advanced, to be sure, but still in one hell of a muddle. No-one is claiming Reason does not have its important applications. But is it the Be-all and End-all, the Last Best Thing? Obviously not. Reason is admirably adapted to advancing our interests in the field of technology and there it should remain. It clearly has little or no relevance to advancing our interests in the fields of either human-to-human relations or human-to-cosmos relations. And yet there it sits, smugly and uselessly, purporting to govern these all -- with the consent of us, the benighted governed, if you please -- generating nothing but sterile chatter, wars, dead-ends, divorces and Paul Stone. Would someone please invent a new Last Best Thing? It's definitely not Reason. Reason is just a fat sacred cow cluttering up the place, the emperor with non-existent new clothes, the trap we each of us eagerly set for ourselves and each other only to be caught in it ourselves moment after moment, day after day, century after century, age after age. Heeelllllppppp........ I propose a Lit-Ideas contest: Invent a substitute for Reason. (It can't be Faith, obviously, since all that did was dump us in the Middle Ages last time around.) Judges are Marlena Boggs and Phil Enns. First prize is of course a list-sponsored dinner with Mike Geary in Memphis. Best, Mirembe President, NPRPRITPS (The Not Particularly Religious Put Reason In Its Place Society) ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html