Dear Marion,

Further thoughts - or questions - about humor and religion.
So far as Christianity is concerned, nothing comes to mind
except Medieval humor about the devil and his doings. I know
that Jewish tradition is rich in humor, but it's my impression
that Jewish humor targets family and society but stops short
of challenging what is deemed holy. Does humor have any function
in the Talmud? Can you enlighten me?

An impressive monument to humor in religion is Goethe's
"Prolog im Himmel", the opening scene of Faust, a parody of
the first chapter of Job, where Goethe has Mephistopheles
telling God: Mein Pathos braechte Dich gewiss zum Lachen,
haettst Du Dir nicht das Lachen abgewoehnt.  (My pathos would
surely make you laugh, if you hadn't broken the habit of laughing.)
In the ensuing Faust drama, both Part 1 and Part 2, the devil's
role wavers between comical and sinister.  Nietzsche's Zarathustra,
a parody of Jesus, also, if I remember correctly, laughs with glee.
Kiekegaard frequently uses humor to defend his religious experience, -
but I can remember off-hand no instance where humor enters into
that experience.

Kierkegaard, as you may know, identified subjectivity with truth
and as such, with the divine. So did the sixteenth century mystic
Johannes Scheffler who wrote under the pseudonym of Angelus Silesius.
Baruch Spinoza, as you probably know, equated God with Substance,
a heresy for which he was excommunicated by his fellow Jews.
Etymologically, substance and subject are related. Substance leads
back to the Greek hypostasis: that which supports something else
because it stands underneath. Subject leads back to the Greek 
hypokeimenon: that which supports something else because it lies
underneath. Both of these terms have undergone sea changes in meaning
over the centuries, and I'm not sure there's much to be gained by
etymological exploration. But I can't entirely put out of my
mind the thought that Spinoza's Substance (i.e. Spinoza's God)
might be that element of ones diverse experiences of the cosmos
and all that it contains, which unifies that cosmos and makes it
"intelligible" by virtue of the inwardness or subjectivity of
substance in the contemplative mind. In that case, Spinoza and
Kierkegaard would be in agreement. What do you think?

Jochen