[lit-ideas] Re: Better to have had faith
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 09:59:42 -0400
This is an interesting and rather apropos comparison between love and
faith. Is it better to have loved, defined here as sitting on top of the
world, feeling utterly complete, accepted (at the right hand of God one
might say), inevitably to experience disillusion and sometimes rancor after
the heroin-like high of love wears off? The operative words here are
heroin-like high, a blinding to reality, a desire for only one thing. I
use this phrase fully aware of Marx's use of the expression opiate of the
masses. Another way of putting it, is it better to have experienced mind
bending drugs than never to have experienced them? Given the popularity of
alcohol and the backlash of Prohibition; the grip that religion has on this
country and on the world; the never ending lovers who find consummate joy
in the movies, and on and on, it's obvious that an awful lot of people
prefer illusion to reality. People get their drugs in whatever form then
can get them.
Andy Amago
> [Original Message]
> From: <Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 5/19/2005 11:49:25 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Better to have had faith
>
> This was found somewhere today. I do not recall, exactly, where--but
seemed
> like it was getting close. Not close enough for Paul, but close for
those
> who thought it was better to have had faith and lost it then never to
have had
> it at all.
>
> Or was that something else...
>
>
> Losing your religion
> The experience of losing your faith, or of having lost it, is an
experience
> that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to
faith if
> faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have
written
> me about this. I don't know how the kind of faith required
> of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not
> grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief.
"Lord, I
> believe; help my unbelief" is the most natural and most human and most
agonizing
> prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.
> - Flannery O'Connor
>
> Thinking, still, of "faith",
> Marlena in Missouri
> (still wondering where Eric is--did he go to Star Wars, too, but end up
in
> The Dark Side?)
>
>
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