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I did this wonderful philosophy course. Many years ago. Remember absolutely nothing. Well not absolutely nothing because as you will see, my point is there are no absolutes. We live on shifting sands. The little bit I do remember, forty years later, is that you can never cross the same river twice. Today's audience is today's. Each is unique.
Which is why I shiver when the politician, John O'Donoghue, says the "reality is .". We don't know what reality is. All we can do is make a stab at it. We should not be offensive about deeply held religious beliefs. But we should run the microscope over the world "belief". And "faith".
Faith, as one wag said, is "believing what you know ain't true". In many cases it is a clinging on to the raft. It is a shut down of all mental processes. Perhaps even an insult to the God who gave us a brain. That is if there is a God. We'll accept the brain. The word here though is accept. And acceptance is a heaven away from a belief.
At Mass one day a priest said, "we are here because we believe". Not true, not all of them. Custom, wanting to do the right thing, a desire for communion in the widest sense, are the imperatives for many. Not quite Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes where the bucketing rain filled the Confraternity city's churches. But not belief either.
Indeed, if we could abolish belief, the world might be a happier place. Robert Frost, or was it Walt Whitman (both their rhythms defeat me so I mix them up) tells us that we should never believe something just because someone else says it's true. A Quaker might say that "we should take off our hat to no man", we should see no more than "the Light of God in every one".
A bit too religious, perhaps. But there is an essential core there. We should respect, we should see the inner wo/man. But no more. We should seek to understand, knowing in humility that we will never really get there.
You remember The Commitments, the very end, the bit indeed which was not in the original book. The band has missed the famous impresario. They will never be famous. But Joey the Lips consoles them. It is not all about being famous, he says. It's about the journey seeking fame.
It's the same with belief. It's a journey, but we never get there.
Paul Murray
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