I have kind of lost faith in my rationality Jim.
This line has stayed with me from a novel I read forty years ago.
for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. — Camus
It from the last chapter when the priest comes to his cell in the early morning darkness to give him his last rites just before he is to be executed at dawn. He throws the priest out of his cell then goes to the window and is comforted by the tender indifference of the stars.
I have opened myself to that indifference. I like how the Quakers use that word "openings"
"The stars are raindrops searching for a place to fall" Willie Nelson
I am not that rational Jim. I am only speaking for myself. I only think I know what I am doing sometimes.
These are my good old days.
I can say I am believer. But my faith is heretical.
Love this book
kind of a holy book for me
"The Faith of a Heretic
Here is a few snips from an Essay by the author
http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kaufmann.htm
"
Harper's Magazine, February 1959.
THE FAITH OF A HERETIC
Walter Kaufmann
When I was eleven, I asked my father: "What really is the Holy Ghost?" The articles of faith taught us in school in Berlin, Germany, affirmed belief in God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost, and I explained to my father: "I don't believe that Jesus was God, and if I can't believe in the Holy Ghost either, then I am really not a Christian."
At twelve, I formally left the Protestant church to become a Jew. Having never heard of Unitarianism, I assumed that the religion for people who believed in God, but not in Christ or the Holy Ghost, was Judaism....
In an essay published in Germany in 1939--or rather in a book seized barely before publication by the Gestapo and destroyed except for about half-a-dozen copies--Leo Baeck, probably the, greatest rabbi of our time, said something profoundly relevant:
A good deal of church history is the history of all the things which neither hurt nor encroached upon this piety, all the outrages and all the baseness which this piety was able to tolerate with an assured and undisturbed soul and an untroubled faith. And a spirit is characterized not only by what it does but, no less, by what it permits. . . . The Christian religion, very much including Protestantism, has been able to maintain silence about so much that it is difficult to say what has been more pernicious in the course of time, the intolerance which committed the wrongs or the indifference which beheld them imperturbed.3
This thought may diminish even one's affection for St. Francis, but not one's admiration for the prophets....
Notes:
2Harper & Brothers, 1958. Many ideas in this article are more fully developed positive aspects and backed up in this book, .....[For a further elaboration of the ideas in this article also see Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic. Meridian, 1959.]
