In case you wondered …

… BBC News - Viewpoint: When did people stop thinking God lives on a cloud? (Hat tip, Lee Lowe.)

I remember when Honest to God came out. I was still in college. Believe it or not, some of my fellow students and I actually discussed the issues it raised. If memory serves, the consensus was that it was just another watering-down in the interest of increasing the numbers occupying pews. To begin with, did anyone ever think that God lived on a cloud? I think most people understood that as imagery for  illustrating an age-old tale about  life (what schooled people call mythos). So much of the modernizing regarding faith is grounded in the assumption by merely schooled that the rest of us are all fundamentally ignorant and stupid. Whereas it is mostly the other way around. Knowing a lot about ideas about things does not always — or even often — translate into any understanding of things themselves.