A stunningly beautiful exposition of the experiential basis of faith and the sense of divine providence. I too, have a faith strongly based on a sense of divine love and mercy, though I would add that more than the author, I also have a strong sense of synchronicity and that everything happens for a reason. Regardless, it is much of what is inexplicable, rather than explicable, that drives my faith, and I think there is nothing irrational about it. Rather, it is the experience of transcendent rationality that is so very often beyond my own limited capability to put into human words. This passage particularly spoke to me: So to me, what I felt listening to Mozart in 1997 is not some wishy-washy metaphor for an idea I believe in, and it’s not a front behind which the real business of belief is going on: it’s the thing itself. My belief is made of, built up from, sustained by, emotions like that. That’s what makes it real. I do, of course, also have an interpretation of what happened to me in the cafe which is just as much a scaffolding of ideas as any theologian or Richard Dawkins could desire. I think—note the verb “think”—that I was not being targeted with a timely rendition of the Clarinet Concerto by a deity who micromanages the cosmos and causes all the events in it to happen (which would make said deity an immoral scumbag, considering the nature of many of those events). I think that Mozart, two centuries earlier, had succeeded in creating a beautiful and accurate report of an aspect of reality. I think that the reason reality is that way, is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of “blundering, low and horridly cruel” biology (Darwin), is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being. I think that Dante’s cosmology was crap, but that he was right to say that it’s “love that moves the sun and all the other stars.” salon/2013/11/02/religions_surprising_emotional_sense_new_atheists_are_wrong_again/
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 15:13:58 +0000
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