A Quest To Seek The Sublime In The Spiritual
by Eric Weiner
December 20, 2011
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/20/144026606/a-quest-to-seek-the-sublime-in-the-spiritual
… Avraham is happy — happier than just about anyone I’ve ever met.
Non-believers might say his happiness is based on a lie.
But who are we to say what is true?
As William James, that great chronicler of religious experience, put it: “Truth is what works.”
On the face of it, that sounds absurd.
But James is speaking of a different kind of truth.
If spiritual practices work for us, if they make us better, happier people, than they are true.
related:
William James
August 30, 2002
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1149206
Commentator Joe Loconte comes to the defense of religion by reminding us of the work of Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James. Although James was himself an agnostic, in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience he credited religious ideals for mankind’s “highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience (and) bravery.”
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philosophical pragmatism, a home-grown American philosophy developed at the end of the 19th century by William James and John Dewey.
Philosophical pragmatists are anti-absolutists.
They believe that compromise, public debate and civility are the building blocks of true democracy.
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May 13, 2009
America’s only homegrown philosophy, pragmatism, this other gospel has been reappearing, reinvented, again and again in the writings of certain American geniuses, thinkers like William Byrd, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William James, John Dewey, and Lynn Margulis.
Book Explores Intellectual Power of William James