The Dish

A reader writes:

What I really appreciate about atheists is that they reflect back to me what my faith looks like to someone who is completely unsympathetic, making them so adept at pointing out the weird fundamentalisms I’ve imbibed. I have to think, Wow, do I really sound that whacked? Quite often atheists have valid points, making me realize I need to go off and reflect quietly within my own thoughts, away from the sermons at church and the rhetoric of Christian friends, and ask why I believe what I believe. Not for apologetic purposes or to sound smart, but just for me.

Your answers to Harris’ criticisms have really fleshed out to me what you mean when you talk about "doubt" in your book. The responses you have given illustrate better than anything how the position you have taken is more credible than fundamentalism, simply because the fundamentalist can’t answer the atheist as skillfully as you do. That has been very helpful to me. I’ve been hesitant to fully embrace the term "doubt" because I’m not sure it really is doubt so much as just plain wisdom and humility that comes from having your faith matured and tested. I used to assert that the doctrines I believe are "the truth" and put that to people quite baldly. But what you articulated about the different ways of reaching truth, whether scientific, historical or religious, is a much more accurate representation of what I’ve actually experienced. A big part of believing what I believe has been going through a long period where I almost lost my faith, thought I was outside the possibility of ever believing as I once did, and thinking I wasn’t worthy of ever going back to it. That was a period of serious, serious doubt that still clings to me today, long after I’ve recovered from it. But having been humbled by doubt, I find that my faith is stronger than ever, because I know how fragile it is and yet how stubbornly enduring it is at the same time.

Seattle, Washington, dawn.

This is taken from the front window of a U.S. military humvee, navigating Baghdad traffic. I’m assuming the unconventional driving is due to the need to keep moving and avoid ambushes or attacks. You can also see how such necessary precautions can nonetheless hardly endear the U.S. forces to the local population.

The truth behind Love God’s Way.

An atheist’s riposte to Kolakowski.

One word: a disgrace.

Today, 4.35 pm, Washington, D.C.

The Daily Star’s Michael Young has tended to downplay the odds of a new civil war in Lebanon in the past. He’s not so sure any more. The good news, however, is that Hezbollah has not been doing too well lately:

The last six months have been a period of meltdown for Hizbullah. The party has been neutralized in the South, at least for the moment; its reputation in the Arab world lies in tatters because it is seen as an extension of Iran; domestically, Hizbullah is viewed more than ever as a menace to national coexistence and civil peace; few Lebanese, other than Hizbullah’s own, believe that its insistence on participating in the political process means respect for the latter’s rules, free from foreign interests; and none of Nasrallah’s political rivals trust him anymore.

Read the whole thing.

"Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. That it is not an inevitable defeat is a claim that cannot be defended in good faith. One can, of course, disperse one’s life over the contingencies of every day, but even then it is only a ceaseless and desperate desire to live, and finally a regret that one has not lived. One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is a sense beyond that which is inherent in human history – if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred.

A hypothetical world from which the sacred had been swept away would admit of only two possibilities: vain fantasy that recognizes itself as such, or immediate satisfaction which exhausts itself. It would leave only the choice proposed by Baudelaire, between lovers of prostitutes and lovers of clouds: those who know only the satisfactions of the moment and are therefore contemptible, and those who lose themselves in otiose imaginings, and are therefore contemptible. Everything is then contemptible, and there is no more to be said," – Leszek Kolakowski, "Modernity on Endless Trial."

(Painting: Mathis Grunewal.)