The Economist’s article head is “Life is a foreign language”

 

In a review of Steven Pinker’s latest the reviewer lays it out this way in the last paragraph:

Fortunately, Mr Pinker is incapable of being dull for very long. Plus he is able to wheel on a formidable array of expert witnesses, both living and dead, to speak wisely and wittily in support of his views and generally jolly things along. Plato, Kant, Twain, Shakespeare and Yogi Berra crop up repeatedly. So does Woody Allen, whose winning line “I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words” beautifully distils Mr Pinker’s point that, when something unpleasant happens to us, our conversation “turns abruptly to sexuality, excretion or religion”.

What a connection! Unpleasant happenings, then our talk turns to sex, shit and religion! Yes, Virginia we do live in a secular world, or a goodly part of the printed world is very secular. There is a reported growing gap between the rich and the poor and I think it’s accurate to say that there is a conceptual disparity between conventional religionists and the rest of us that parallels the rich/poor disconnection. I feel I could even say that those disparities, one material and the other spiritual or in the human psyche are widening and closing to any extent.

Then there is the notion put on table that life is a foreign language or that the way we live and think about living flows from a built-in gap in our way of thinking about life and its meaning for us, religionists vs. secular humanists/atheists. Or we may be programmed to view our life and its meaning to us in very disparate and disconnected ways depending on our view of the meaning and purpose of life as we conceive of it.