Today at lunch with a friend, our conversation segued into religion. Religion is a topic many of us find uncomfortable. Some of us have a robust faith, and some take pains to be unaligned, (my term for the agnostic.)  Putting labels to use to discuss religion is certain to over-simplify, to distort a more complicated viewpoint. Yet, it is quite impossible to refuse the conventional identifying labels for ideas about god, even to characterize different faith communities, – if anything at all is to be said. What is one to do?

We ate our sandwiches. We thought about all the occasions when faith was not proof against the failings to which human beings are all vulnerable. What can you say when a practice of devotion does not save one’s marriage from failure? There’s a long list of hazards to which we are all exposed as a consequence of how we live. What rejoinder can be made when faith/God fails to inoculate one from tragedy?  Everyone prays when nothing else is to be done…  Heaven is silent, then what?

If you’ve spent time with evangelical believers or with Catholics who understand faith as a practice, — you will hear on occasion this response: the individual may fail, due to a defect of character. The Faith nevertheless is unsullied, stands untarnished.  The pivot separates the believer from pristine divine ideals.

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It is up to each reader, to judge whether that inference makes sense, or whether it side-steps the issue. Perhaps you will guess easily enough what I happen to think. That does not matter. The only conclusion that matters is your own….

Here is what Nietzsche had to say about a similar dilemma:

38

The Pious Retort

God loves us, because we are made by him.
“But man made God!” say the refined.
Should he not love what he designed?
Should he, because he made him, now deny him?

That inference limps; it has a cloven-mind.*

— excerpt The Gay Science. Prelude in Jokes, Cunning and Revenge by Friedrich Nietzsche, pub. 1887, trans. by Walter Kaufmann

• cloven-mind means confused, incoherent