Templar Edification

My high-school curriculum did not require Latin in order to graduate—I’m not quite so old as that—but I am old enough that it offered Latin as an elective. To be honest, it was an easy A, especially as I’d already taken a few semesters of Spanish, itself a Latin derivative. With its low level of stress and heavy dosage of Roman history, Latin class soon became a favorite of mine. We even took a bus-trip to Broadway, in order to see A Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Forum, which tickles me to this day. I try to watch the DVD on every Saturnalia. This youthful dalliance with the Classics continued into my undergraduate matriculation [the formal process of enrolling and admittance as a student at college or university], where I signed up for further Latin courses, a minor focusing on Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and even a few graduate-level Imperial Roman history classes. I met one of my best friends there; upon graduation, we were invited to join an international ...

I saw a post online the other day, which claimed that 49% of Minnesotans—less than half—say that they believe in God. Now, I don’t put much weight behind such polls, however they gather their data. I remember reading recently that 30% of self-identified atheists also affirm that they believe in God. Try to make that one make sense. But the very notion of “believing in God” is something of a category error, a confusion of terms. Most people who deny belief in God are thinking of a god; that is, of a powerful yet limited supernatural or spiritual creature of some sort, akin to what Jews and Christians might call angels, or even fae. Yet God is not a god. God, in the classical sense—as understood by the great monotheisms, including Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Baháʼí, Zoroastrians, Platonists, and, I would argue, certain strains of Buddhism—is not a part of Creation, not a being within the universe, not even properly an object of belief; because God is not an object, not a th...