Face to faith
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1646099,00.html
Religion's insight that human beings are essentially flawed gives it
the edge over secularism, writes Nicholas Buxton
Saturday November 19, 2005
The Guardian
It is a secularist article of faith to maintain that religion will soon
be eliminated as a by-product of "progress". Since there is no reason
to suppose that life has some overarching meaning, the notion of a
benevolent God who intervenes in history on our behalf is basically
nonsense and should be abandoned.
Atheists complain that religion proposes unprovable accounts of life
and death. But this is uninteresting. Death is obviously a fact, but
how we make sense of that fact is not the sort of question that could
be subject to "proof" any more than a painting could be judged "wrong".
Insights into human nature derived from the plays of Shakespeare may be
equally "unprovable", but that doesn't mean they're not meaningful,
useful or true. The atheist's first mistake, then, like the
fundamentalists they often object to, is that they completely miss the
point. Faith has nothing to do with certainty: it is not a set of
closed answers, but rather a series of open questions with which to
engage.
Nicholas Buxton
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