Magnificent Post by Tom Paine

Linked to above is a superb post on the subject of faith by Tom Paine at The Last Ditch. He is an atheist, and discusses what he thinks is the legacy and value of religion in our society, together with a view of how this fits into a multicultural society.

In many ways he expresses things I agree with, except that I have failed to become an atheist: not because I am stupid, or because I can't see rational argument, but because I see it as a temptation that I really don't want to follow. It isn't that I want to go to heaven, or anything like that: it is that I want, like the Victorian agnostics, there to be purpose in the universe. I know that people can create purpose for themselves, but I find it difficult to rationalise the process of somehow inhering coherence ("injecting"? how do you describe the idea of creating inherency?)or meaning into an object which does not possess those qualities per se. As I have commented before, I want there to be more to creation than just what I can see, or what I can understand, because I am a limited, fallible being, and I am no basis for a theory of everything. This is why I've also long been interested in UFOs and the paranormal, although I've become more inclined towards total disbelief in these. It isn't because I don't want death to be the complete end, although I don't;more, perhaps, that I don't understand the process of becoming a non-existing thing, though I've seen it many times. I still don't truly know which is worse: judgment or annihilation. Elements of each are contained in the other. I understand the postmodern creation of value and life, I think, I just don't believe that it holds, either philosophically, or personally.

I know this makes me stuck somewhere in the 1870s, but I can live with that. The wonderful post I've linked to above shows that its author is stuck somewhere in the 1930s or 40s, before postmodern atheism, aggressive and intolerant, pretending to be civilised secularism, took root in our public institutions. Who really thinks, that when the Charities Bill becomes law, the religious charities will not be the first to be told to conform to that kind of secularism, or lose their status? How long before the Charities Commission becomes full of the kind of idiots who populate the Lottery fund, with wonderful records in progressive activism, and decides that the state cannot be seen to support financially any religious body at all?