Rite & Reason:It is better to live with unanswerable questions than with questionable answers, writes Paul Murray
I did this philosophy course. Many years ago. Aquinas overload, but fun. I remember absolutely nothing. Well not absolutely nothing because as you will see, the point is that there are no absolutes. We live on shifting sands. The bit I do remember 40 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 wince when that Fianna Fáil politician tells us 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 word "belief". And "faith".
Faith, as one wag said, is "believing what you know ain't true". In some cases it is a clinging to the raft. It is a shut down of 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, and of course fundamentalism.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto in his Truth says Christian fundamentalism is "silly" because it deifies books and dogmas of obviously human composition.
However rational, Christianity appreciates that the Bible and the church are merely the best approximations we have of the will and presence of God in the world.
One day at Mass the priest said, "we are here because we believe". Not true, not all of us.
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 the insistence on belief, the world and the religious environment might be happier places.
And we should never believe something because someone else says it's true.
As the Buddha said:
Believe nothing because a so-called wise man said it.
Believe nothing because a belief is generally held.
Believe nothing because it is written in ancient books.
Believe nothing because it is said to be of divine origin.
Believe nothing because someone else believes it.
Believe only what you yourself judge to be true.
Leslie D Wheatherhead in The Christian Agnostic refers, when quoting these words, to that wonderful moment of freedom when having been manacled by being told what we ought to believe, "we throw it away and discard it forever as the nonsense it has really always been".
Even if the church says it, or it is in the Bible.
In the Unitarian view, "it is better to live with the unanswerable question, than with the questionable answer".
A Quaker might say that "we should take off our hat to no man", although we should see "the light of God in every one".
A bit too pious, perhaps. But there is an essential core there.
We should respect, we should see the inner woman or 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 of the film. 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 arrive.
This is why we all like happy endings, why children thrive on the triumph of good over evil at the Christmas pantomime. Deep down even they know there is a lot of grey in daily life, even in the Celtic Tiger.
Their pantomime, our pantomime, is a reprieve from having to traverse the shifting sands, and from the courage that often demands.
We are, or many of us are, relatively rich, and happy according to the latest survey. Yet we can't decide when our children should be legally entitled to have sex. Embarrassing perhaps, but we should find some consolation in that within this debate there is considerable and genuine doubt.
Religious leaders, even with their firm opposition to extra-marital sex, have shown commendable understanding of the difficulties in policing sexual activity according to chronological age. They grasp that there is a legislative difficulty.
And unlike some politicians, who have an election to win, they are thinking deeply of the moral and social consequences.
Their voices should be heard. It is compelling when couched in debating, discursive terms.
One that will be listened to as it moves away from the "it's in the Bible, God said it, and we believe it" mantra.
Paul Murray is a member of the Dublin Unitarian Church