Friday 29 April 2022

With or without religion?

 Two quotes from Chesterton - accidentally encountered.

A religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in; ...
Wherever men are still theological there is still some chance of their being logical.

Every detail study leads us, for all our logic and capacity, into vast areas of the unknown.

I am doing an exercise trying to imagine letters to my children (and grandchildren) without being too specific or direct. Like a spider sailing into the air to find a node for her net, and weaving multiple shapes in which to catch the unwary prey, I am throwing out these lines of thought. Have any of our traditional words got the strength of a spider's web? 

Each node in the web holds a puzzle piece to be turned over. Are there any with straight edges? Do adjacent nodes have shapes that fit or matching colours? I have turned over 6 nodes so far: In the Beginning, The Human Situation, The Problem Space, Holiness, Trust, Instruction. They seem to get harder and harder. The number of keywords explodes. The number of synonyms too. Much that is unsuitable for children until their 50th birthday and perhaps not even then.

It is the cosmos I live in. I thought theological was bordering on the illogical, but with so many unknowns, so many gaps, we are far from being able to abandon theology. If God (pronouns: they, their, one, themself) did not exist, they would have to be invented.

שְׁמַ֖ע יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵ֖ינוּ יְהוָ֥ה ׀ אֶחָֽד



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