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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Thursday, April 07, 2005

entry arrow2:03 PM | For XP

Faith will always be fragile if it is something that prospers, or is allowed to, only by ignorance or lack of challenge. Or worse, by treating challenges as the devil's machinations and moving to stamp them by murder of the body or soul, or both. I have seen enough intolerance, from religious and secular faiths, to last me a lifetime. Oh yes, there are secular faiths too, which punish "heretics" with the murder of the body and soul, the murder of the soul taking the form of expulsion from the fold -- the secular equivalent of excommunication -- and body in the form of "killing fields."

I've always thought you could still be a Christian while saying, like Rushdie, "I am a modern, and modernist, urban man, accepting uncertainty as the only constant, change as the only sure thing." Or you could still be a Christian while saying, as a friend of mine, a priest, did more insightfully some years ago, "Faith is the tension between doubt and certainty." He tried to show it in a poem about a priest who is gripped by that tension at the moment he hoists the host to sanctify it. Faith is a plunge, but it is not plunging willy-nilly.

People have a right to believe? Yes. But they do have a right to doubt, too, along with it.

[from conrado de quiros]


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich




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