oh mal

To return to the terrible tragedy. These events are always testing times for the religious. Some have their faith broken, some have it reaffirmed. It's my view that humans invent religions and gods largely through fear of or dissatisfaction with their own mortality. They invent gods who in turn reinvent humans as demi-gods, created in God's image, capable of attaining immortality through salvation or good works or whatever. Events like this, with its horrendous toll, with the seeming arbitrariness of its destruction, have the effect of blasting away such cosy religious notions, but not for long, the human spirit is ingenious, its ability to rationalise virtually infinite. Don't worry, Christianity isn't remotely threatened by events such as this, and nor is any other religion.

Our only response a groaning that is like prayer? Poetic perhaps, but there are many practical things that can be done for the bereaved, and to prevent such tragedies from recurring, and already much good work is under way. This may sound glib to those who hear behind this tragedy the sound of God stirring, but I can't help sounding glib to a believer - I'm an atheist after all, it's an occupational hazard.

My weight is 77 kilos according to my unreliable scales. Too embarrassed to mention all my eating, not good.

Reading: more Shane Maloney, The Big Ask; some pages of Adelaide Review; a few pages of Life, a user’s manual by Georges Perec; a few pages of The Bloomsbury book of the mind; essays by Malcolm Muggeridge; essay ‘Earthquakes and the objectivity of the world’ by Peter Sellick.

Back now to Muggeridge.
So dear Malcolm, it seems that your belief is a matter of faith and obviousness, something not worth arguing for, as that would only cheapen it, but it seems to me that your belief is all about the idealism that has obsessed you since childhood. Your god is an absolute, and his ideal nature is captured in your remarks about ‘confronting’ this god. ‘What can be said with certainty is that, once the confrontation has been experienced – the rocky summit climbed, the interminable desert crossed – an unimaginably delectable vista presents itself, so vast, so luminous, so enchanting, that the small ecstasies of human love, and the small satisfactions of human achievement, by comparison pale into insignificance.’ I believe this is something of a gloss on Bunyan, but I don’t believe in your certainty – non-believers are all convinced that believers are bullshitting themselves. Anyway what is this but an ideal to beat all the broken ideals you’ve kicked at throughout your life? Your final attempt to evade the quotidian horrors of reality you so fear and so exaggerate, a reality you’ve never been able to fully face or to suffer in terms of hard work for little gain? Basically you wanted everything to be effortlessly larger than life, so the natural conclusion would be to embrace a ‘faith’ and a ‘God’ who‘ll guarantee this effortless space beyond the wincing failures and tweaking hungers of actual red-in-tooth-and-claw existence on this planet.