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I’m not speaking from any solid ground here, but might this have some relation to Bergson’s influence on Whitehead’s conception of time? If time has a ‘thickness’ as I believe Bergson suggested, and if god were temporal, then god could be divided into moments. This would seem to suggest questions as to whether some fraction of god perishes in the transition from moment to moment and in turn might threaten (in Whitehead‘s schema) the possibility of continuity across time. Pure speculation here, folks! Feel free to slice it to ribbons.

Unrelated aside: Prof. McDaniel do you have a preference as to how you are addressed?

While not as learned as others here on the topic of religions, it strikes me that there is a distinction to be made between at least two flavors of religiosity: orthopraxy, and orthodoxy. I cannot be sure that Marcus Aurelius was practicing religion when he sought to remind himself in his Meditations that:
“ When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.
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Perhaps I am quibbling on semantics but do you think it fair to delineate between practical philosophy, practical spirituality, and religion? I suppose I ask because despite the rhyming that Huston Smith points to, the seems to be a great deal that divides the methodologies of purification across religious practice, and the mark of division is revealed by such questions as, “in service of what (or whom)?“

That is not an answer to your good question, surely, but I thought I might seek clarification. Thank you

I hope others will not take me to be disparaging their positive experiences of god in the context of their faith tradition. I only point to my own experiences. Clearly John Cobb and many others find hope and promise in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, among other visions of peace.

That is lovely, Bill. Having been raised Catholic, and subsequently spent a decade anti-religious, now a curious agnostic, Whitehead’s speculations on the nature of god point to something (or rather some idea/entity) that I catch only brief wisps of in most traditions. The god that I read and hear about in process thought is one that seems worthy (to me) of consideration, for meditating on, in no small part due to what you are directing attention to. Not a supreme deity in need of unquestioning subjugation in hopes of the possibility of joining in everlasting love; demanding obedience and atonement for imperfection. Rather, one that preserves what should persist, and lures the cosmos away from decay, entropy, into a greater and ongoing realization of possibilities. A god that bears witness to, co-experiences alongside joy…so much tragedy and loss, and doesn’t not forget what could have been, was not, and what could be. What is it that we might help each other preserve, if not everything that could be saved?