“The idea of God as telekinetic mind with
intelligence, knowledge, plans, preferences, control over events, etc., is
completely unacceptable to me. This is obviously human projection taking
thousands of highly elaborated cultural forms. Yet I have, in dire straits –in
foxhole conditions you might say—experienced the feeling that I can only
describe as my life or fate being in the hands of God. Like William
James, I think there is religious experience and related forms of so-called
mystical experience that are moving and meaningful. I just don’t believe in
supernatural persons, and I think the forms of fear, hope, antipathy and
confidence that the major world religions stimulate in people are more
destructive than constructive.”
- Catherine Wilson
Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity
By Catherine Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2008. Index, bibliography, 304 pages. A study of Epicurean influences on many of the ideas that pervaded seventeenth and eighteenth century metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and natural and political philosophy. VSCL. 
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