Un-Certain

 

I still feel like shit, although rather less so: I think the old immune system is getting the better of this little swine, touch wood. One thing I didn't include in yesterday's bifurcated rant was that we should remove the ability of high-fee-paying public schools to claim charitable status: an historical anomaly dating back to the Middle Ages, when schools such as Eton College were founded on exactly that charitable basis, to allow poorer commoners a chance of a leg-up in life. Much has changed since, and reform is required.

Also, I mentioned in passing: religion vs the secular. Trevor Phillips wrote in the Times - quoted in the i, yesterday - and accurately, that ethnic and religious minorities are not the ones abandoning faith; rather the erstwhile, Christian majority of this archipelago. Where I distance myself strongly from his stance, is in his assertion that the largely white and middle-class 'intelligentsia' are strangers to doubt and feel that they/we have already found the answer to everything. No-one is a stranger to doubt, especially where personal mortality is concerned; and the biggest doubters I have known, facing down their own mortality, have been otherwise lifelong devout Christian believers.

As to the infidel, I could do worse than take my cue from my Dad, who, as I've surely said before, faced his own demise with equanimity; indeed, curiosity. The 'answer to everything', as Phillips posits that the faith-less claim as certain, is in my estimation no answer at all: no thing, at all. Where Phillips sees Christianity and his belief on this arc is open to question. Certainty and belief are shades of the same hue: both are false, both are true; both are equally un-certain.