faith
You are viewing stuff tagged with faith.
You are viewing stuff tagged with faith.
Andrew Sullivan’s short and potent The Madness of King Donald levels-up when it ends with a subject rather more profound than our current administration:
I’ve managed to see Scorsese’s Silence twice in the last couple of weeks. It literally silenced me. It’s a surpassingly beautiful movie — but its genius lies in the complexity of its understanding of what faith really is. For some secular liberals, faith is some kind of easy, simple abdication of reason — a liberation from reality. For Scorsese, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery, and often inseparable from crippling, perpetual doubt. You see this in the main protagonist’s evolution: from a certain, absolutist arrogance to a long sacrifice of pride toward a deeper spiritual truth. Faith is a result, in the end, of living, of seeing your previous certainties crumble and be rebuilt, shakily, on new grounds. God is almost always silent, hidden, and sometimes most painfully so in the face of hideous injustice or suffering. A life of faith is therefore not real unless it is riddled with despair.
Much to the chagrin of many an established church, people like me find comfort and solace in the logical investigation of the existence of God. I say: “many paths to faith.” Anyhow, on his New York Times blog, Stanley Fish recently posted an examination of the intersection of two authors’ views on suffering and evil (logically) titled “Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God.” It’s an interesting treatment of the topic — I am particularly drawn to this Anthony Flew character, author of There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.
It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom.
— French Proverb
This entire week has been an atrocity. Busy everytime I turn around, the time I’m taking to write this right now is borrowed from a lab that I got time off from (it’s also my lunch time). That said, I was unlocking my bike yesterday to race to a workout and couldn’t help but notice a Rice Crispies bar lodged between my front reflector and tire. My first reaction to the foreign substance on my bike was anger - it was an inconvenience to kick the dang thing off. A moment or two later, though, I looked at the bar on the ground (it had a bite out of it) and the humor sunk in. I mean … there’s a Rice Crispies bar wedged into my bike. That’s funny. Try to make an argument against the humor there. I could just imagine some guy (I’m assuming it was a guy … do you know girls who litter desserts?) walking up to my bike and taking the time to carefully set the bar in there so it fit just so. As Daniel Bogan would say, “People can be so damn strange sometimes.”
The Nine Billion Names of God - God, Faith, Monks. Great short story writing by Arthur Clarke.