In the Zhuangzi, how
can Zhuangzi possibly know that the fish are happy? To know what it is like to
be a bat, a person must be a bat. This is not to say that we disagree with
bats. Sonar represents the “sheer otherness” of a bat. In Christianity, how
does eternal joy and bliss differ from happiness? Happiness is not a theological
concept. There are different kinds of experience, and it follows that they have
different kinds of truth-claims. To treat every such claim as the same kind of
thing is premised on conflating domains of human experience that are
qualitatively different. I contend that the domain of religion is both distinct
and unique. Our ordinary ways of describing the world and even ourselves are
not well-suited to our endeavors in the domain of religion.
The full essay is at "Religious Liturgy and the Wholly Other."
