The Dish

A reader writes:

I’ve been catching glimpses of your conversation with Sam Harris. But what’s caught my eye have been the e-mails from your detractors like this one and this one and this one. The last one in particular, which asks,

"Do you think God knows that you won’t have very good answers to the points Sam Harris brings up at the end of his last reply?"

got me thinking that this obsession with "good answers" points to something close to the heart of this frustration with faith, something you touched on in your last post to Sam – the concept of mystery.  Not the Colonel-Mustard-in-the-library-with-a-candlestick kind of mystery, but the awe-and-humility-before-truths-and-experiences-greater-than- we-are-and-deeper-than-we-can-grasp kind of mystery. Seekers like you and I aren’t afraid of it, and find our lives are invigorated by it. Some, however, seem allergic to it.

But why is it so hard to embrace mystery? It is so tightly woven into our human experience.  The search for answers to even the most basic questions about ourselves can take us to unplumbed depths of the unknown:  Who am I? Not my name, not what I do, but who am I? What do I want? Why do I love this person? What is the meaning of this experience? Try to really answer these questions, really answer them, and you inevitably run up against the unknown. And the unknown only grows and multiplies when we ask the even bigger questions that reach beyond ourselves: Where did I come from? Why am I here?

Maybe this is the fundamental disconnect between believers and non-believers – that the latter insist on answers, and if the answer appeals in any way to mystery, then the answer must be wrong. But practical human experience shows us that mystery is all around us, and that answers to even the simplest questions often cannot be found or must bow, at least somewhat, to mystery – not as a cop-out or a catch-all explanation, but as a humble acceptance of the limitations of human understanding and the possibility that the answers are more than we can know. 

Sometimes, instead of finding answers, we just have to live the questions. And we do. We all do. Every day. This is the real world and our experience of it: no matter how much we know, most of the important stuff is steeped in mystery. Strange that some athiests, who fashion themselves realists, cannot accept that simple reality.

This reality is, in my view, the core basis of all true religious faith and the only solid philosophical foundation for political conservatism. It’s also why I find agnosticism far more persuasive than atheism.

Student Eurocommuting comes to Britain.

Try not to worry too much about the latest attempt to figure out who made it and distributed it in 2001.

There’s a new study to worry about. I wonder what blogging does to health in the long run.

"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness," – George Orwell, 1944. Darrin McMahon unpacks that insight helpfully here.

A conservative wants more than minimalist judges from a Republican presidential candidate on social and domestic policy.

They’re mandating a Bible study elective in Texas schools, and they’ve geared the materials for a Protestant fundamentalist tilt. Money quote from the co-sponsor of the bill, Leo Berman:

"I don’t believe there’s such a thing as the separation of church and state. In fact, the First Amendment to the Constitution actually calls on the United States Congress to make sure, to ensure that people are allowed to practice their religion."

Acording to JewsOnFirst, "Berman recently gained notoriety by proposing the denial of all government services to the citizen children of undocumented immigrants." Sounds like a Christianist to me.

A reader reminisces:

Ah, memories – thanks for that one! I do have Trog at home but haven’t watched it in ages. I used to think Trog was a sad comedown from Crawford’s golden days in Mildred Pierce, A Woman’s Face, etc. – but this clip is very special.

By the way, Trog was played by Joe Cornelius – lovely guy, a pro wrestler who then tried his hand at acting, which turned out to be a fairly brief interlude for him until he took over the local pub in Pimlico, the area of London where I spent my teenage years during the 1970s. I didn’t (couldn’t) set foot inside Joe’s pub, but my mum and her boyfriend certainly could, and did, drawn there by Joe’s warm hospitality! I’m sure the licensing laws have changed since our day … Nice to see Michael Gough flying the flag in there also.

An extra treat then. If you watch the whole movie, Ms Crawford is quite clearly sloshed through much of it. Can’t blame her myself.

A reader addresses one central point of contention between Sam Harris and me – by supporting my position from a more agnostic perspective:

Moderation vs. Fundamentalism. How much doubt is too much? Why not doubt the whole shebang?

The answer: because doubting the whole shebang is a "certainty" that could be as mistaken as believing in any particular religion. The argument for believing in a "tolerant" religious framework is because we do not, and cannot, know the truth of either atheism or of any theism. In such a case, it is worth keeping an open mind that there may, indeed, be larger forces in the universe than our human minds can rationally be aware of. Given what science has revealed to us in the past decades about the nature, force and cause of the universe, I’d wager the likelihood of there being more to the universe than what we can perceive is much greater than the likelihood there is not. One can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. But all scientific evidence suggests the physical limitations of the human consciousness separate us from the true nature of the universe. God is merely that true nature; religion, like science, a path to glimpse a part of it, not an expression of the whole.