It´s the shrooms, man

 

Yes, our old bro Huston is back. A little introduction to the psychedelic predicament. Far out, dude!

It´s a niche thing

 

Overheard on the internets: "The next time you think speculative evolution is weird, remember that hummingbirds are a theropod dinosaur filling the ecological niche of a bee."

Bingo!

Reminds me of Huston Smith, who once opined that maybe the hummingbird is the divine archetype of a bird LARP-ing as a butterfly...

Huston´s hummingbird

Huston Smith is a "soft" Traditionalist and perennialist who is mostly known for his book "The World´s Religions", a best seller in its day which was also widely used as a school textbook in the United States. "Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World´s Religions" (first published in 1976) has been marketed as a sequel to "The World´s Religions" (at least in its 1992 incarnation), but is really nothing of the kind. Rather, it´s Huston Smith´s personal statement of belief. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but as a good perennialist, Smith of course claims that his take on Traditionalism is the hidden kernel of all religions. 

"Forgotten Truth" comes across as a peculiar combination of standard Trinitarian Christianity and Advaita Vedanta (or something close to it). Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Platonism and Native American spirituality are also referenced. Without attribution, there are a few borrowings from Theosophy. It´s almost fascinating how seamlessly the author navigates the diverse religious landscape as if it were a unified whole. Of course, he also quotes various Traditionalist writers. The book contains an appendix with the very 1970´s title "The Psychedelic Evidence", discussing Stanislav Grof´s research into LSD as evidence for the objective reality of the soul and the spiritual realm. (It´s a public secret of sorts that Smith was a buddy of Aldous Huxley and probably "tripped" together with him.) Incidentally, this isn´t necessarily intended as criticism. While "Forgotten Truth" is hard to read, it´s also quite interesting...

Summarizing Huston Smith´s points is hard, but much of the book revolves around a criticism of modern science, scientism and something the author calls "prevolution" (progress + evolution). Smith is careful not to repudiate modernity in toto - he believes that the abolition of slavery is a good thing, for instance - but he clearly believes that the modern West have lost something very fundamental when it broke with "tradition" and embraced a fully materialist worldview. It´s time for us to "rejoin the rest of humanity". In the same vein, Smith is careful not to idealize premodern society (although he does have a soft spot for Muhammad and the Muslim empires, but also for Paleolithic hunters and gatherers). What he wants restored isn´t so much the social structures of premodernity, but the mystical religion and the idea that humanity is part of a much vaster cosmos than the physical one, a cosmos crowned by God and Infinity. That´s our true destiny.

In Smith´s theology, both the personal god of theism and the "impersonal" spirit of certain forms of Hinduism are equally real. The Infinite is higher than the personal god, but on his own level, God is equally real. One thing that surprised me when reading the book is Smith´s strong emphasis on bhakti and the love of a personal god, and also the idea that God reciprocates by loving the devotee. Indeed, all love ultimately comes from God, the devotee simply giving God´s love back to him. I had assumed that Smith was more into the Infinite end of things. However, the author believes that there isn´t any contradiction. The mystical unity with the Infinite Spirit necessarily goes through loving devotion of an anthropomorphic deity, since love breaks down the barrier between the lover and the beloved, and hence creates a "unity" already on this level. I assume this is the perspective of some Hindu schools, but I have never seen it spelled out this clearly before.

The weakest part of "Forgotten Truth" is Smith´s rejection of evolution, and he even predicts that most readers will find his musings on the topic downright crazy. Well, he´s right. This is where Smith writes that animals are incarnations of eternal archetypes which simply dropped down from heaven ready made, without any prior evolutionary development. The hummingbird is the Platonic form of a bird pretending to be a butterfly! Er, wut? Since Smith is an "old earth creationist", he is locked in the same contradiction as his evangelical Christian counterparts: why do the Platonic forms drop down from the deep blue sky in a rough evolutionary sequence? At one point, Smith dares to go further, suggesting that perhaps degeneration is present in the fossil series in the form of "prehuman" forms which are really "posthuman". This is probably taken from the Theosophical speculation that apes are degenerate humans, rather than evolutionary cousins of our ancestors. 

Smith freely admits that his non-belief in progress will be just as hard to accept for the modern reader as Gurdjieff´s statement that the Moon eats people. This may have been true in Space Age 1976 and even more in 1992 (when Fukuyama won the Cold War). Today, it´s the easiest part to believe! What´s harder is Brother Huston´s insistence that there is hope, a transcendetal hope to be sure, and that somehow our earthly sufferings will all prove to be a necessary part of a larger perfection...

Perennialist maze

 

Richard K Payne is a scholar of Buddhism based in Berkeley, CA. In 2009, he edited a volume in honor of the recently deceased Roger Corless, another scholar of Buddhism. The book, titled "Path of No Path: Contemporary Studies in Pure Land Buddhism Honoring Roger Corless", contains one contribution freely available at the website "Academia.edu". It´s Payne´s very own contribution "How not to talk about the Pure Land", the Berkeley Buddhologist takes on none other than Huston Smith, author of the highly acclaimed "World´s Religions", but otherwise most known as a prominent perennialist and Traditionalist. And of course, psychedelic trip bro to Aldous Huxley! (Smith passed away a few years ago.) 

Payne clearly doesn´t like Huston Smith, although he admits that he is (was) a very charismatic personality. In fact, Payne frequently accuses Smith of acting in bad faith, only to qualify this ad hominem in a weird footnote: "We are using the term here as described by Jean-Paul Sartre—willfully re-maining ignorant of one’s own choices, that is, treating oneself as unfree (a being-in-itself), in order to avoid the responsibility of free choice (a being-for-itself)." That may be what "bad faith" means at some obscure theological union in the Bay Area, but everyone else would read it differently. And as one of my commentators would no doubt put it: "Who´s we, sucker?".

That being said, Payne does score a number of points against Huston Smith. Ironically, it seems that Smith was sometimes describing Buddhism from a "modernist" perspective, despite his Traditionalism. While the modernist angle is presumably from Smith´s pre-Traditionalist days, he never revised the bulk of his public writings on Buddhism. The Buddhism he describes is really a 19th and 20th century "Protestant Buddhism", often a modernized version of Zen. Another problem is Smith´s perennialism, which is no longer a tenable position in religious studies. Religions really are different from each other in very fundamental ways, and seemingly universal concepts such as "faith" turn out to have subtle or not-so-subtle shades of meaning depending on cultural context. Smith makes it even harder for himself by arguing that "traditional" religions are similar both exoterically and esoterically, while a more clever perennialist would presumably hold that the similarities are esoteric only (perhaps impersonal mysticism). The Traditionalist aspect isn´t taken seriously by Payne at all. The notoriously grumpy Traditionalists won´t like this article! To Payne, Traditionalism is simply warmed over Romanticism and/or sheer rhetoric, and its "soft" version a form of entryism into milieux where the hard variety would be unpalatable.

To Payne, Smith wants to impose his own theology (Payne´s term) on all (or perhaps most) religions, a kind of quasi-Christian Kabbalistic Neoplatonism. On Payne´s interpretation, this has little to do with Pure Land Buddhism, or indeed any Buddhism. There is no hidden reality in Buddhism: the Buddha actually saw reality as it is. Buddhism isn´t about "salvation" (i.e. salvation from sin through a divinely appointed savior). The similarities between Pure Land Buddhism and Christianity (really Protestantism) are grossly overstated, such as the claim that Amida is a "savior" bestowing "grace" on those who have "faith" (although he admits that the problem is complex and different takes on it exists). Other religions don´t fit Smith´s perennialist criteria either. Taoism, at least on some interpretations, doesn´t make a clear distinction between "spirit" and "matter". Certain forms of Hinduism don´t seem to be emanationist. And many religions emphatically don´t have a "happy ending". What about Sheol and Ragnarök?

Payne´s own view of Buddhism is only indirectly visible in the article, but I was struck that he sometimes sounds like a Buddhist modernist himself. He implies that Buddhism isn´t a religion, that its mysticism is "pure psychology", and that it´s perfectly compatible with science. Nor does it have a metaphysic. Sounds familiar? He also attacks the anti-modernist and hierarchic perspectives of Traditionalism, moreover accusing it of being crypto-theocratic. It´s also intriguing to note that Corless, whom the author knew personally, practiced three religions simultaneously: Catholicism, Shin Buddhism (a form of Pure Land Buddhism) and Nichiren Buddhism. This strikes me as strange, since - as far as I know - these three religions are exclusivist. Corless also admitted that they were different on a deep level. Since Huston Smith believed that Reality is ultimately paradoxical, he might - ironically enough - had paid some compliments to Payne´s friend...

With that, I end these reflections.   

The Gospel according to Brother Huston

"The Soul of Christianity" is a book by Huston Smith, otherwise most known for his books on the perennial tradition. Smith's book is relatively short and non-polemical. In fact, he says nothing about the Gnostics and almost nothing about Eckhart, two obvious choices for those who want to harmonize Christianity with the Eastern religions. Nor does he mention the bodily postures of the hesychasts. Instead, Smith claims that the first millennium of Christianity is compatible with the perennial tradition also represented by Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, etc. Weirdly, he claims that Christianity was essentially united during this period. This statement is manifestly wrong. What about Jewish Christians, Gnostics, Arians, Nestorians, Monophysites? At one point, what we call orthodoxy might actually have been a minority position: "Athanasius contra mundum".

While Smith claims that Christianity is in touch with something objective, something that is really "there", independent of our human minds, in practice he divides the Christian religion into two rather distinct spheres. The objective part of Christianity is broadly compatible with Smith's own religious perspective, a version of Advaita Vedanta. The more distinctive Christian dogmas are theological interpretations, and hence in a sense "subjective". While some Christians might indeed see their tradition in this manner (I'm sure Origen would have been impressed), many others would argue that the theological interpretations are just as objective, indeed, that they are *more* correct than the general/perennial perspective. Even the irenic C.S. Lewis argued for this more narrow view. The constant conflicts over theological minutiae during the first Christian millennium are a strong argument against Smith's ultra-irenic inclusivism.

Smith claims that the Infinite (the unfathomable Godhead) is higher and more fundamental than the Trinity. Further down is the man Jesus, a man who was so imbued with divine love and energy that he perfectly reflected the Godhead. The virgin birth is an allegory, and while the resurrection is in some sense real, Smith emphasizes that it wasn't a resuscitation of a dead corpse but an entirely new form of life. The position is compatible with several different interpretations. Smith also strongly presses the point that damnation in Hell isn't eternal. He is, if not a universalist, at least very close to one. (Here, he is similar to Lewis, at least the Lewis of "The Great Divorce".)

Among the theological interpretations are: the Incarnation, the Atonement, the virgin birth, the Trinity, Chalcedonian Christology, etc. Smith doesn't claim that these interpretations are "wrong", probably because he doesn't have to. Since the unfathomable is always One, while always being expressed in symbols, the author can believe both in his own perennialist perspective and traditional Christian theology. However, this calls for a closer discussion: surely different symbols can express *different* ideas? Why doesn't Smith accept the symbols of Gnosticism or Monophysitism, for instance? Or those of Nestorianism? Conversely, why does he accept Buddhist or Muslim symbols? Why does he sometimes exemplify Jesus' actions by mundane or absurd anecdotes, such as the (admittedly entertaining) story about the shirtless bodybuilder on the beach? If the symbols express something "objective", can they really be so diverse as nirvana and the resurrection?

On one level, Smith is actually more "traditional" than many other metaphysical writers. He says in an interview reprinted in the book that "The Soul of Christianity" is a response to Marcus Borg and the Jesus Seminar, who believe that the Gospels are concoctions. Smith believes that the Gospels are true in the sense that they correctly report the impact of Jesus on his disciples. He implies that somehow this impact was objective and that the Gospels therefore aren't completely non-historical. The differences (many would say contradictions) between the four gospels are explained by simply being four different perspectives, all equally true. The divine side of Jesus impacted John in particular, while Matthew was more impacted by the Jewish traits, etc. Of course, even if some of the gospels could be proven to be a hoax, Smith could *still* claim that they are "true" in the symbolic sense. At one point, the author retells a somewhat frivolous anecdote about a theologian who asks St. Paul in Heaven whether or not he wrote Ephesians. Paul distractedly responds: "I think I did". Smith fills in by saying: "Who cares?"

I suspect neither traditional Christians nor sceptics will like "The Soul of Christianity". Somehow, Smith both gets to have his cake and eat it!

I'm not a Christian, and I'm not saying that this particular perspective on Christianity is uninteresting. However, it probably wasn't the self-conception of the early Church or most of the Church Fathers. When all is said and done, this book is really the gospel according to...Huston Smith.

Huston, quit the ganya and check this out!

"Butterflies of the Neotropical region. Part 1" is part of a mammoth work covering all butterflies of the world. This is the first volume dealing with South and Central America. It contains sections on the families Papilionidae (swallowtails) and Pieridae (the Whites).

Sometimes, you can find really strange things in books on natural history. I was reminded of Huston Smith's book "Forgotten Truth" when looking through Bernard D'Abrera's work. Am I getting crazy again? Well, not entirely.

In his perennial classic, Smith claims (only part flippantly) that a hummingbird might be the Platonic form of a bird pretending to be a butterfly, and that it just fell from the sky one day, with no previous evolutionary history. I couldn't help thinking of this rather peculiar alternative to Darwinism when I saw that D'Abrera's book on butterflies starts off with two verses from the Vulgate, and an extensive quote from Thomas à Kempis.

For reasons all his own, the author quotes the epistle to the Colossians, 1:16-17: "For by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him, and for Him: And He is before all things, and by Him all things consist." Amen to that, brother! The statement by Kempis is less clear: "What signifies making a great dispute about hidden and obscure things, which we shall not to be reproved in the judgement, for having been ignorant of? (...) And what matter is it to us of genera and species? He to whom the Eternal Word speaks is delivered from a multitude of opinions". I never read "The Imitation of Christ", but something tells me Kempis wasn't talking about butterflies...

I guess D'Abrera is advising his entomological colleagues to stop arguing over the finer points of lepidopteran taxonomy, and simply enjoy their natural beauty. A noble sentiment. Except, of course, that all butterflies in this book are in pinned conditions and taken from the collection of the British Museum. LOL.

Well, at least it's good to know that the thorough explorers of the Neotropical region can't lay their hand on the Platonic form of a butterfly...

Magical mushrooms

Most dry, scientific reference works will forever remain...well, dry, scientific reference works, stashed away in some obscure archive of a university library.

And then there's "The Genus Psilocybe" by Gaston Guzman, subtitled "A systematic revision of the known species including the history, distribution and chemistry of the hallucinogenic species". Weirdly, the book is published in the small and sleepy European principality of Liechtenstein, not southern California!

As already mentioned, this is a super-scholarly book, definitely not for the layman or general hippie-reader. But sure, it really does deal with Psilocybe, a worldwide genus of mushrooms mostly known for its "psychedelic" species. The book contains identification keys, black-and-white drawings, photos (some in colour) and very technical species presentations. There's a list of vernacular names of the hallucinogenic species. There is an introductory section on these species, but unfortunately it looks like a long list of references.

Still, I don't think it's a co-incidence that this very technical work has three reviews on Amazon, while most other books of this type has none!

Huston?

Bad weeds

"The Biology of Canadian Weeds" is a book edited and compiled by Gerald A. Mulligan. The articles featured are reprinted from the Canadian Journal of Plant Science. We also get a taste of that phoney Canadian bilingualism, since every article has a very short abstract...in French.

The papers on the various weed species look similar, and include information on ecomomic importance, habitat, history, growth and development, reproduction, hybrids, responses to herbicides and parasites, etc. etc. Range maps are included. There is also a list of references appended to each article.

The definition of "weed" is, of course, somewhat subjective. The Eurasian Watermilfoil destroys beeches, clogs water supply systems and provide habitats for blood-sucking insects. Attempts to use it as fertilizer, animal feed or soil conditioner have met with only limited success. Sounds like a truly bad weed. Meanwhile, the Great Burdock is just "unsightly" at those wonders of Candian aesthetics known as roadsides. In Japan, it's used as a vegetable!

I'm not sure how to rate this book, mostly intended for students of botany. In the end, it gets three stars.

Huston?

How traditional is Traditionalism?

"Against the modern world" is a scholarly study of Traditionalism, a current of thought associated with René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon and Julius Evola. Others mentioned in the book include Mircea Eliade, Huston Smith and the National Bolshevik Party of Russia. Indeed, one wonders what these disparate personages and movements really have in common, except the name and a certain admiration of Guénon, the "founder" of the Traditionalist school? "Against the modern world" also traces Traditionalist influences on people not generally considered Traditionalist, such as Thomas Merton and Seraphim Rose.

The author, Mark Sedgwick, believes that Traditionalism is characterized by three main ideas, which he calls perennialism, inversion and counterinitiation. Perennialism (also common outside the Traditionalist fold) is the idea that all religions and philosophies have a common, inner message. This message is primordial and secret, and often expressed in the form of symbols. Only a small elite can understand it. The outer forms of religions and philosophies might vary over the centuries, but the esoteric message does not. Inversion is connected to anti-modernism, the idea that the modern world is actually an example of regression rather than progress. Inversion more specifically denotes that what is base, vulgar or indifferent is turned into something positive. Counterinitiation is more difficult to grasp. It seems to be a sectarian concept, whereby the Traditionalists reject other alternative religious groups as representing a fake pseudo-tradition. René Guénon criticized the Theosophical Society on this basis.

If Traditionalism has a founder, it is surely the French writer René Guénon, whose most famous work is "The crisis of the modern world". Guénon was a maverick Catholic when he developed Traditionalism. Later, he moved to Egypt and converted to Islam, while nevertheless keeping his Traditionalist ideas as a kind of esoteric message. Guénon's writings have inspired a rather heterogenous set of people, from respected scholars of comparative religion to strange New Religious Movements. It has also influenced some Muslim groups. More disturbingly, an activist form of Traditionalism has been taken up by fascists such as Julius Evola or Alexander Dugin. Sedgwick's book rather scrupulously follow each line of development, which explains the attacks from some other reviewers, who believe that Evola, Schuon or Eliade aren't "real" Traditionalists. Sounds familiar? Sedgwick also distinguishes between "hard" and "soft" Traditionalism. The latter, for obvious reasons, isn't always easy to distinguish from New Age or some kind of ecumenism.

A question that comes to mind when reading this book, is how traditional Traditionalism really is? Guénon rejected the Theosophical Society, but his own message is a blend of Western occultism, Eastern religions, and even the legend of Atlantis and Hyperborea. In other words, something similar to the occultic-Theosophical streams Guénon claimed to have broken from. In contrast to the Theosophists, Guénon didn't create an eclectic new religion. Rather, he attempted to influence the Catholic Church from within, and failing that, converted to Sunni Islam. However, the esoteric message known only to the elect, is in effect an eclectic blend of very different elements! Frankly, I was surprised when I started reading some of Guénon's own works (which I did prior to reading this book). I expected Guénon to be "traditionalist" in the usual sense of that word, say, a traditional Catholic or a conservative Muslim. Instead, he talks about Atlantis, Hyperborea, pre-columbian contacts with America, numerology, and what not. This tendency is even more pronounced in the writings of Julius Evola, whose wild speculations have nothing in common with traditional religion. (But then, we are supposed to believe that this is an "esoteric" message, revealed to the hoi polloi only in the present dispensation.) As for Frithjof Schuon, I think it's fairly obvious that his Sufi order was really a modern, syncretist movement - something Traditionalists ostensibly oppose.

I recommend Mark Sedgwick's book to everyone interested in...New Religious Movements.

The incoherence of the philosophers - or the incoherence of the incoherence?

"Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology" is a fascinating exchange between David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith. The book is part of a series edited by Griffin, "SUNY series in Constructive Postmodern Thought".

Although Griffin calls his position "postmodern", it's actually a version of Process Theology, a liberal Christian theology heavily indebted to the philosophy and metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, i.e. a very modern project. Indeed, Whitehead's attempts to create an all-encompassing, rationalist metaphysics and a virtual Theory of Everything strikes me as almost Early Modern, especially since God and theodicy are part of the equation. Whitehead was ignored by the broader philosophical community (I suppose they were more into Heidegger or Wittgenstein), but he had a mesmerizing influence on some liberal Christian theologians, including David Ray Griffin himself. I admit that Whitehead's philosophy of process sounds fascinating!

Griffin's antagonist, Huston Smith, is a Perennialist or Traditionalist. The scholar Mark Sedgwick refer to Smith as a "soft" Traditionalist, and Smith does indeed seem to be more "liberal" than René Guenon, Frithjof Schuon or Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Ironically, it is Smith rather than Griffin who occasionally sounds "postmodern". His personal religious beliefs are highly eclectic, and seem to be a combination of Advaita Vedanta and Gnosticizing Christianity, with a whiff of Theosophy. This makes Smith simultaneously defend both notions close to traditional Christianity (the Trinity, the creedal statements) and notions more typical of Vedanta (God as the impersonal Absolute beyond qualities). Curiously, Smith was once a Process theist himself, while Griffin held to Theosophical notions before he became a Process theologian. Thus, both men are defectors from the other's camp. Indeed, this seems to have been what prompted Griffin to challenge Smith on a debate in the first place.

At bottom, the debate between Griffin and Smith is an exchange between a rationalist philosopher and a mystic. Since the positions of both men are somewhat original, it's hard to make any parallels, but imagine if Leibniz or Kant would debate Bernard of Clairvaux or Ramakrishna. Griffin emphasizes rationality, logic, coherence and science (which he wants to fuse with theology and philosophy). Smith is more into mystical experiences, intuitions, paradox and mystery. Both men stumble heavily on the problem of evil, since both Perennialism and Process Theology affirms that evil is eternal and even in some sense necessary. Smith attempts to take the Vedantist-derived position that evil is really a hidden or higher good, while Griffin affirms the reality of evil, while denying the omnipotence of God, which makes evil virtually impossible to eradicate. The choice between a God that *wont* eradicate evil and one that *can't* eradicate it, sounds somewhat moot!

Another important difference concerns the personality of God, where Smith believes that God is supra-personal while also having a personal aspect, a position Griffin considers incoherent and therefore meaningless. How can anything be supra-personal? Or both supra-personal and personal? To Griffin, God is personal. However, God also seems limited by at least three other metaphysical absolutes (including "creative experience"). Dualism is another point of contention. Griffin rejects dualism in favour of panpsychism, while Smith (as usual) embraces several different strands of opinion at once. Yet another serious difference concerns political and social progress: while both men sound "liberal", Smith is pessimistic about progress, while Griffin believes that a liberal reform program is virtually a religious duty. On one point, the two protagonists sign an uneasy truce: both reject Neo-Darwinism in favour of a theistic evolutionism based on "punk eek". (In reality, Smith is probably a creationist.)

Although the debate isn't particularly fun or entertaining, I was nevertheless strangely fascinated by it. I never met David Ray Griffin or Huston Smith, but I've read some other texts by them. Both men come across as distracted professors, but there the similarity ends. Griffin sounds like an annoying busy body and know-it-all, who've Seen The Light and is incensed by the fact that nobody else gives a damn. Remember: Whitehead's metaphysics explain *everything*, including the essence of God the Father. Imagine that. Smith, by contrast, seems more laid back and even have a somewhat frivolous sense of humour. I can almost see Smith meditating peacefully in an incense-filled room with a stoned Aldous Huxley and a smiling lama in the background. (Perhaps even the animal called lama!) In this debate, however, Smith does get progressively more exasperated. He just can't prehend Griffin.

Another reason for my fascination is that both Ray and Huston seem to co-exist within my own humble self. Five or ten years ago, I would probably have sympathized with Griffin, or at least with his attitude. Everything, including God and the immortal soul, must be *proven* by science, rationalist philosophy, or both. It must be somehow political, too. Thus, Griffin believes in personal immortality because the (purported) scientific facts of parapsychology seem to suggest this. Panpsychism, in contrast to dualism, is at least in principle scientifically verifiable. Et cetera. If one cannot prove a religious viewpoint in this manner...bye! Today, while not "religious", I'm more appreciative of Smith's position. If God exists, he cannot be a "person" in the traditional sense, the paradoxes of quantum physics suggest that even "our" world is ontologically weird, and what makes us think that a human perspective on things is enough?

The main problem with both Process Theology and Perennialism is the inability to solve, or even admit, the problem of evil. The process people attempt to untie the Gordian knot of theodicy by denying the omnipotence of God - a possible solution, but only in a rationalist-speculative sense. The point of religion, usually, is something else than solving metaphysical riddles or mathematical set problems. Indeed, I suspect that this might be one of the reasons why process theology is a distinctly minority position: who wants a god that cannot eradicate evil and suffering? The Perennialist position, at least as stated by Huston Smith, boils down to Auschwitz or the bubonic plague somehow being part of God's perfection. I don't think Smith *really* believes that, showing that his position is just as impossible as that of Griffin. What the solution might be, I don't claim to know, except that "evil" cannot even be coherently conceptualized within the confines of materialism, making that particular "solution" moot as well.

With those reflections, I'll call it a day.