[I actually wrote this blog with pen and paper on my flight back from AZ]

I have this habit of seeing movies over several weeks. What happens is I'll be flipping through the channels and come across something I like, only I'll be 1/3 of the way into the movie. Then another day it will be rerun and I'll watch the part I missed before.

The latest movie I've watched this way is Contact. Now, I read the book when I was 15 and I saw the movie when it came out about 12 years later. I knew there would be differences between the movie and the book. I thought I knew what they were, but I couldn't fully trust my memory, so I decided to reread the book. Especially since there are interesting philosophical questions raised in the book that were not in the movie.

The thing I liked about the book then, and still like now, is the dialogue between the main character, Ellie and a televangelist named Palmer Joss. Carl Sagan actually treats Joss quite sympathetically. His character is intelligent and thoughtful. He and the Ellie do quite a bit of verbal sparring in the book.

In part of the book that I've recently reread, I came across an idea that I didn't catch when I was 15 and I find very interesting now. Ellie has just done some research to prepare for her first meeting with Joss. She comes across an early 20th century theologist named Rudolf Otto. Otto describes the mystic feeling one gets when contemplating divinity as "numinous." It's a sort of feeling of awe.

Now, Ellie asserts that scientists experience this same thing. They too contemplate the universe and experience the same sense of awe. She posits that religions try to institutionalize the numinous instead of providing a means to experience it directly. Scientists, she argues, have a kind of spiritual experience, but based on science and not religion or faith.

I think by the time I read this book I already had doubts about Catholicism. Looking back, this book was probably a factor in my rejecting rejecting it in my adult life. It certainly raises some good questions.