On religion and intelligent people..

``When there was as yet no shrub of the field upon earth, and as
yet no grasses of the field had sprouted, because Yahweh had
not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the
soil, but a flow welled up from the ground and watered the
whole surface of the earth, then Yahweh molded Adam from
the earth's dust (adamah), and blew into the nostrils the breath
of life, and Adam became a living being.''

Harold Bloom comments:  ``To shape by molding, to make a fiction, is to
fashion Adam out of the adamah, out of the red clay.  Adam is not faked;
he is fictitious and not factitious.  Yet J's uncanny trope of this fashioning
has become another facticity for us.  True reading would recover the trope,
and yet can any of us avoid literalizing it?''  _Ruin the Sacred Truths_ p.10

You can understand it's a figure of speech for the origin of figures of speech;
language for the origin of language; but Bloom is right, you can't read it without
literalizing it anyway.  It is good poetry.

Take religion as figures of speech for relations between people, ethics.

Levinas _Difficult Freedom_ p.17

``The moral relation therefore reunites both self-consciousness and
consciousness of God.  Ethics is not the corollary of the vision of
God, it is that very vision.  Ethics is an optic, such that everything I
know of God and everything I can hear of His word and reasonably say
to Him must find an ethical expression.  In the Holy Ark from which
the voice of God is heard by Moses, there are only the tablets
of the Law.  The knowledge of God which we can have and which is
expressed, according to Maimonides, in the form of negative
attributes, receives a positive meaning from the moral ``God is
merciful,'' which means ``Be merciful like Him.''  The attributes of
God are given not in the indicative, but in the imperative.  The
knowledge of God comes to us like a commandment, like a Mitzvah.
To know God is to know what must be done.  Here [?sic] prophets preoccupied
themselves not with the immorality [?sic] of soul but with the poor, the widow,
the orphan and the stranger.  The relationship with man in which contact
with the Divine is established is not a kind of spiritual friendship but the
sort that is manifested, tested and accomplished in a just economy and for
which each man is fully responsible.  ``Why does your God, who is the
God of the poor, not feed the poor?'' a Roman asks Rabbi Akiba.  ``So we can
escape damnation,'' replies Rabbi Akiba.  One could not find a stronger
statement of the impossible situation in which God finds
himself, that of accepting the duties and responsibilities of man.''

Notice that the Rabbi is speaking with the figure of speech in mind,
within the figure of speech.  See Wittgenstein below for why a figure of speech.

Levinas p.89 on another baffling figure of speech:

``We have just seen that the Messiah is the just man who suffers,
who has taken on the suffering of others.  Who finally takes on the
suffering of others, if not the being who says ``Me [Moi]''?

``The fact of not evading the burden imposed by the suffering of others
defines ipseity itself.  All persons are the Messiah.''

This further explained in Levinas _Outside the Subject_ p.125

``One's duty regarding the other who makes appeal to one's responsibility
is an investing of one's own freedom.  In responsibility, which is, as
such, irrecusable and non-transferrable, I am instituted as non-interchangeable:
I am chosen as unique and incomparable.''

That is, it is the call from the other that makes me unique.  So you can
see figuratively how my soul has something to do with God, if God has to
do with ethics, and my soul originates in the call to me from another.

Do not forget the trope, but also translate it.  You will find that religions
do very well at keeping tropes that translate into ethics.

In a way, you will find you believe in the religion, anyway enough so
it's pointless to say you don't.  The religion is figuratively tracing out
the phenomology of relations to others.

Here's Cavell _The Claim of Reason_ p.411 on the (inclination to say) soul:

``It may be that the sense of falsification comes from the way I understand
the phrase ``have a body.''  It is really a mythological way of saying
that I am flesh.  But I am not satisfied with this myth, for it implies that
I also have something other than a body, call it a soul.  Now I have three things
to put together: a body, a soul, and me.  (So there are four things to
be placed: I plus those three.)  But I no more have a soul than I have
a body.  That is what I say here and now.  People who say they have a soul
sometimes militantly take its possession as a point of pride, for
instance William Ernest Henley and G.B.Shaw.  Take the phrase ``have
a soul'' as a mythological way of saying that I am spirit.  If the body
individuates flesh and spirit, singles me out, what does the soul do?
It binds me to others.''

So Cavell uncovered the ethical trope.

Finally here's Wittgenstein _Culture and Value_ p31e on why a trope:
(Wittgenstein citing Kierkegaard)

``Kierkegaard writes: `If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in
his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal
punishments?' - Question: But in that case why is this Scripture so unclear? If
we want to warn someone of a terrible danger, do we go about it by telling
him a riddle whose solution will be the warning? - But who is to say that the
Scripture really is unclear?  Isn't it possible that it was essential in this
case to ``tell a riddle?''  And that, on the other hand, giving a more direct
warning would necessarily have had the wrong effect?  God has four people
recount the life of his incarnate Son, in each case differently and with
inconsistencies - but might we not say: It is important that this narrative
should not be more than quite averagely historically plausible just so that
this should not be taken as the essential, decisive thing?  So that the letter
should not be believed more strongly than is proper and the spirit may
receive its due.  I.e. what you are supposed to see cannot
be communicated even by the best and most accurate historian; and therefore
a mediocre account suffices, is even to be preferred.  For that too can
tell you what you are supposed to be told.  (Roughly in the way a mediocre
stage set can be better than a sophisiticated one, painted trees better than
real ones, - because these might distract from what matters).''

People who love their religion are in love with the trope, its reach and
resources.  It is well enough done so you can't avoid (also) literalizing
it.

There is also garbage religion, just as there is moralism, and the difference
is that of good poetry to bad.

One effect of the trope, its ``imprecision,'' is that my responsibility to the
other is not limited.  The slogan would be that it is infinite, but the
trope is interested in a true phenomology.