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Believing, Disbelieving, And Suspecting
Disordered Thoughts On Religion

... Of course arrogance comes in forms both personal and temporal. People tend to regard their own time as wiser and more knowing than all preceding times, and the people of earlier ages as quaint and vaguely primitive. Thus many who do not know how a television works will feel superior to Newton, because he didn't know how a television works. (Here is a fascinating concept: Arrogance by proximity to a television.)

It will be said that we have learned much since the time of Newton, and that this knowledge renders us wiser on matters spiritual. We do have better plastics. Yet still we die, and have no idea what it means. We do not know where we came from, and no amount of pious mummery about Big Bangs and black holes changes that at all. We do not know why we are here. We have intimations of what we should do, but no assurance. These are the questions that religion addresses and that science pretends do not exist. For all our transistors we know no more about these matters than did Heraclitus, and think about them less.

Many today assuredly do know of the questions, and do think about them. One merely doesn't bring them up at a cocktail party, as they are held to be disreputable.

Yet I often meet a, to me, curious sort of fellow who simply cannot comprehend what religion might be about. He is puzzled as distinct from contemptuous or haughty. He genuinely sees no different between religious faith and believing that the earth is flat. He is like a congenitally deaf man watching a symphony orchestra: With all the good will in the world he doesn't see the profit in all that sawing with bows and blowing into things.

This fellow is very different from the common atheist, who is bitter, proud of his advanced thinking, and inclined toward a (somewhat adolescent) hostility to a world that isn't up to his standard. This is tiresome and predictable, but doesn't offend me. Less forgivably, he often wants to run on about logical positivism. (I'm reminded of Orwell's comment about "the sort of atheist who doesn't so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him." Quote approximate....