From: fshck@UMAC on 29/04/2001 11:17 AM
difficult and dangerous to generalise
but it does seem that there's all sorts of stuff
one can't help believing in this world,
ways one can't help being,
wheres one can't help being from
and it does seem that what the atheists and the theists
have in common is the profession of faith, certainty
and this is why others are jealous of them
and that poetry and philosophy are other ways to go
- not ways that exclude religion or the rejection of religion
but other ways to go
because they're about the practice of openness
of course to say that is to idealise the work of everyone
who ever sat on the big ambivalence fence
in the hope of calling poetry
and surely that's a problem too
because poetry's for making problems
too
W.H. Auden : ?The greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but unlike the
rest of us, he does not build one?
Christopher Kelen,
English Dept,
University of Macau
Taipa, Macao, CHINA
domfox wrote:
>
> I'm probably nearer to "a/theist", but I enjoyed it too.
>
> Schoolfriend of mine used to alter the words of the hymns we had to sing in
> chapel to make them derisive, or statements of vehement unbelief. I didn't
> grok the vehemence. I would have understood protesting against the fact that
> we had to be there, but he seemed to be protesting against something else
> again. I would say - speaking for him, of course, and perhaps he would say
> otherwise - he had, after all, an image of god in mind, and what he objected
> to was anybody *worshipping* anything as monstrous as that god would have
> had to be. A daily ritual of blasphemy, denial, curses and imprecations
> hurled at the mad, blind, senile, sadistic Nobodaddy would have suited him
> just fine. And whatever that is (Dennis Potter would have understood it),
> it's not atheism.
>
> Dom
I would agree. When asked my affiliations I usually say I'm a
Judeo-Marxist Gnostic. Which usually ends the party. - FP
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