Neural Buddhists

Another excellent column by David Brooks this morning, even though his effortless list of neuroscience reading made me feel as if I should crawl back into my hole of ignorance. But this view of faith in modernity is a powerful one:

Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

My italics. The question embedded here is the momentous one, it seems to me. Why should God be love? As someone never able to shake off belief in God, I find it much more challenging to believe that God is benign. Why should God not be evil? That, to my mind, is the greatest revelation of Jesus - and it has to be  revelation. Deus Caritas Est. Buddhists intuit this, which is why the overlaps between Buddhism and Christianity have been so compelling to many in recent years.

I could go on, but I obviously have some reading to do ... Derb's two farthings are here.