Category Archives: Elizabeth

Still close to my heart

Standard

At this time of year I tend to “go to pieces” (so to speak), and find it hard to concentrate or to keep two thoughts running consecutively. On Saturday just past I marked the 6th anniversary of Elizabeth’s death. At this time of year my normal functioning is greatly diminished. Her absence at any time is always palpable, but on the 8th of June I find it hard to think about anything else. I have little rituals to go through, fixing up the grave site after the winter, placing flowers, and then watching (and listening) to the talk that I gave at her memorial service, and, after that watching again the slide show (presented at the memorial) which I called, simply, “Elizabeth: A Love Poem.” I light a candle in her honour while I do this, and on the lighter are engraved the words, “Dignitas et Libertas,” as she had requested our daughter to do. Here is a picture of the candle burning before photos on the mantelpiece (one taken two weeks before she died, the other in 2002, just before our drive across the continent), the same candle used on the first anniversary in 2008. Ritual and liturgy run very deep in my blood, so these things are quasi-religious expressions of the importance that Elizabeth’s life played in mine (and mine in hers).

June 8 2013 (2)

June 8 2013

It was teeming rain at the time, very reminiscent of the monsoon rains in India, and the rain lasted all day. It reminded me of the poem I wrote in my cycle of poems about Elizabeth, entitled, “It’s raining now.”

It’s raining now
and every drop
a tear
that I have shed
for you.

I wonder now,
if I will ever know a time
that will not rain.

There’ve been so many torrents
since you left
that all the world’s an ocean;
and I sometimes think I’m drowning
in that watery world.

The flood keeps rising higher,
seething round
my little barque alone,
without the firm sea anchor
of you, your flaming body,
the other half of me,
the flesh and fire harmonious
that gave us steerage way,
and a clear path to follow
out to sea.

Without you I flounder
in this wavy, reckless world of gales,
with seas that roll through fog banks stretching
beyond the nearest light,
that. beckoning,
might, but cannot –
piercing that endless, rolling, foggy sea–
give comfort in my storm.

I lose myself sometimes in dreams and fantasies,
of what was more real than real,
of snowy epiphanies,
of bodies and of fire,
as when we strayed from room to room
in perfect consummation,
when we were one flesh, one body we,
one world entire.

It’s so alluring, so very inconstant there.
There is no warning –
silent and alone I face the storm,
and gaze once more with longing
over the craggy coast
of that endlessly surging, raging, foggy sea.

It’s still raining now.
I wonder if I will ever know again
a time that will not rain.

At the time it was, indeed, raining, and it was still raining when I typed the last words. As I said, these simple poems came to me in a rush during a week or two in July or August 2008, fully formed, just as they are. The first poems I ever wrote. I have never had the “daimon” again. So, they came, I know not whither. But wherever they came from, they are a tribute to the love we shared. It was an enormous privilege to have shared Elizabeth’s life and to have known her love.

About these ads

The Epistemology of Evil

Standard

Perhaps I should have commented over at Butterflies and Wheels, but the case of “Beatriz” (not her real name) in El Salvador (which means, of all things, The Saviour), where the Supreme Court of that benighted Catholic country has just said “No!” to her appeal for an abortion, seems to me worthy of more thorough examination. One more atrocity in the name of religion. The appropriate response is Ophelia’s: “Bastards. Fiends. Demons.” – though given my penchant for exclamations marks, I’d have said, “Bastards! Fiends! Demons!” So a tip of the hat in Ophelia’s direction.

There may seem very little to add to that succinct expression of anger and outrage, but I’d like to explore Beatriz’s situation in relation to something in the New York Times this morning. If you have a few of your free pages at the NYT left, perhaps you could take a look at it and see what you think. It’s an op-ed by a Stanford University anthropologist (T.H. Luhrmann) who has written a book about the American evangelical relationship with God – which clearly begs a number of questions – who thinks, as she says in her title, that “Belief is the Least Part of Faith.” It’s interesting how people seem to be jumping on the “faith isn’t really believing” bandwagon since Sam Harris opened the first salvo in the god wars, but it has become one of the commonest tropes amongst those who want so badly to say something nice about religion, but want us to understand that they are not so foolish as really to believe in such things. And neither, so the story goes, do the “believers,” who are more interested in – and these things do seem to trip so lightly off the tongue – “how to feel God’s love and how to be more aware of God’s presence.”

Continue reading →

Old Age Rational Suicide?

Standard

I’m not altogether sure what is meant by “old age rational sucicide,” but here is an example where, it seems to me, ordinary provisions for assisted dying would have provided all that is needed. There is a video and an article. I will upload the video here, and link to the articles in the Australian newspaper, The Age, here and here. So, first, the video, then a short comment:

Error
This video doesn’t exist

Michael Cook, the Editor of BioEdge, a conservative bioethics blog from Australia, is tied up in knots about this, partly because he thinks of Beverley Broadbent as relatively healthy, and partly because he questions the ethics of the journalist who reported Ms. Broadbent’s point of view without even trying to dissuade her from taking her life. As he says:

In the first place, a journalist is first of all a human being. Didn’t Medew [Julia Medew, the reporter] have a moral obligation to dissuade a relatively healthy woman from committing suicide?

Of course, the answer to that is: it all depends. If Ms. Broadbent had been a young person in the prime of life, who was suffering from a episodic bout of depression with a specific physical or social cause (like the loss of a loved one, a love affair gone wrong, or whatever), it would seem that this would be the appropriate thing to do. However, Ms. Broadbent’s reasoning is hard to fault. She is afraid of being caught up into the medical system in such a way that there is no escape, and rather than proceed with all the ramifications of starting the process she thinks it best to leave when she is still able to enjoy life, but may not be able to enjoy it much longer.

Of course, if Australia had provision for someone like Beverley, and could promise her that, if she started the process, she could exit the process at any time with medical help to die, if the process looked to be a long and arduous and ultimately pointless exercise in trying to stretch her life out another few months or years, that would require surgery or chemotherapy or radiotherapy, etc. The point here is that, facing an uncertain future, and having no legal way out of the complex of procedures that a biopsy might set in motion, she chose instead to stop the process before it began, because she did not feel confident of being able to stop it later with the sort of consummation that she had prepared for herself.

But the fault is neither with Ms. Broadbent, nor with Julia Medew, but with governments which continue to refuse people alternative measures at the end of life. My wife Elizabeth, for instance, might have lived some months longer. She would have had to suffer the continuing indignity involved, as she experienced it, of her nursing care, but she might have opted to stay longer, but only if she had an alternative ending of her own choosing at a time chosen by her. Failing that, she decided to go to Switzerland, and received help in dying from Dignitas, because the alternative would not have been available here. Michael Cooke is simply out of his depth.

He wants to add to Medew’s file blame for not following World Health Organisation guidelines regarding the reporting of a suicide, which warns of the copycat suicides that sometimes follow the reporting of a suicide. But Ms. Broadbent’s suicide was of a very different sort, and not likely to influence those who are liable to die by suicide for other reasons that would be invoked by the self-chosen death of a older person facing possibly difficult medical circumstances. A promise of assisted dying when her outlook became even bleaker, if that occurred, would likely have kept Ms. Broadbent alive. If governments refuse to legalise assisted dying because some people might die before their time, they must take into account the deaths of people like Ms. Broadbent, who might still be enjoying her declining years, had assisted dying been legal.

Elizabeth during our early days of courtship

Standard

Just so you know…… I have been busy for the last few days with a production team producing a documentary on assisted dying. Today is the last day during with I will be involved, so I should be back more or less to normal by tomorrow. Not only has the experience been exhausting; it has, of course, stirred up many memories, and that has been emotionally draining, so I am in a different “head space” just now, and find it difficult to think straight enough to write my usual daily blog post. Hopefully, I will be able to be back at the job tomorrow. I am sorry to disappoint those who look forward to their daily CiD fix, as someone says in a comment below, and I thank you for your patience.

Continue reading →

This Blog is really all about Elizabeth

Standard

This is my first blog post at Free Thought Blogs, so I want, from the start, to explain my own reasons for being here, for thinking of myself as a “freethinker” (a term which still does not come easy to me), and for wishing to join a community dedicated to freedom of thought, atheism, and opposition to religious belief. I also want to make the point as clearly as I can, as I start out, how Elizabeth (my wife who died in 2007 in Zurich) is the main inspiration of all that I write, and the patron “saint,” if you like, of this Blog. Without her, I would have been a very different person indeed. I will also remark on some of my present interests and concerns.

At the masthead or banner of my blog choiceindying.com, there from the very beginning in December 2010, has been the tag line, “Arguing for the Right-to-Die and against the Religious Obstruction of that Right.” However, had it not been for Elizabeth, my wife of almost 18 years and best friend for 20, whose picture (sitting on a peak in the Lake District) is in the banner above, and who is now in my Gravatar image as well (precisely because what I am trying to say about her part in this is true), I probably would never have come to the point of disbelief, for not only was she a disbeliever long before I was, it was her struggle to die, when her MS, and the misery and pain and indignities associated with it, became so intolerable, that opened my eyes to the fact that, even for a liberal “believer” of the “Sea of Faith” sort, there were moral issues of great importance that I had simply overlooked by the general institutional support that accompanied my membership in, and action on behalf of, a specific religious institution. This stood out for me in stark relief the moment Elizabeth tried to take her own life, and failed, thus setting her on a course which would eventually take her to Zurich, where Dignitas, the assisted suicide organisation which accepts foreign applicants, helped her, with great kindness and dignity, to die, as she sought to do.

Elizabeth herself, though many years younger than I, was the formative influence in my life, far more important than schooling or religion. A woman of great integrity, energy, intellect and joy, she offered me unconditional love, and provided the basis for the freeing of my mind from the dead weight and trammels of my past. Though I do not believe in destiny, the shape my life took seemed – because I can only think of my life until the point that Elizabeth and I exchanged our love as but a propaedeutic and forerunner to the fullness of life that I would come in time to know with her – almost predestined, as though we were supposed to meet and fulfil each other’s dreams of love and commitment. This was expressed in a poem I wrote after her death, entitled “Easter Rising,” about an unexpected intimate encounter with Elizabeth very early on the first Easter morning after we had (earlier in the year) first exchanged our vows of love (and, truth be told, shortly before I would go out to celebrate another resurrection, in a more formal, liturgical way). The poem ends on this note:

One flame forever,
as in the snow,
deeply blended,
each to each,
we yielded,
as the sun began to climb,
and, as one, arose together,
that first Easter morn,
enfolded in each other,
a new creation,
of each other born.

Religion, from that point, began to play an increasingly secondary role in my life, and though I continued to function as a priest in the Anglican Church for all the years of our marriage — and was, indeed, more actively involved in the institutional life of the church on a diocesan level – it was perhaps inevitable that, with Elizabeth’s death, my active participation in that ministry should come to an end. I soon realised that “faith,” for me, had become not only very tenuous, but, indeed, an impediment to clarity of thought and fulness of life. I remember with great affection, however, the years I spent as a priest, and the people I served and learned to care for and admire during all those years, especially those years of priesthood which I shared with Elizabeth, who taught me (for the first time in my life) what it is to love and to be loved in return. It was when the beliefs of the church began to have an immediate impact on the life of the one I held most dear, that close relationship with the church, and participation in its official ministry became intolerable. It is important to recognise that the church does not truly acknowledge the right of its members to value things differently than these things are valued through the church’s institutional expression; and being an active and supporting member of the church is in fact to uphold and defend those values, even when one most strenuously disagrees.

Continue reading →

This blog, really, is all about Elizabeth

Standard

This is my first blog post at Free Thought Blogs, so I want, from the start, to explain my own reasons for being here, for thinking of myself as a “freethinker” (a term which still does not come easy to me), and for wishing to join a community dedicated to freedom of thought, atheism, and opposition to religious belief. I also want to make the point as clearly as I can, as I start out, how Elizabeth (my wife who died in 2007 in Zurich) is the main inspiration of all that I write, and the patron “saint,” if you like, of this Blog. Without her, I would have been a very different person indeed. I will also remark on some of my present interests and concerns.

At the masthead or banner of my blog choiceindying.com, there from the very beginning in December 2010, has been the tag line, “Arguing for the Right-to-Die and against the Religious Obstruction of that Right.” However, had it not been for Elizabeth, my wife of almost 18 years and best friend for 20, whose picture (sitting on a peak in the Lake District) is in the banner above, and who is now in my Gravatar image as well (precisely because what I am trying to say about her part in this is true), I probably would never have come to the point of disbelief, for not only was she a disbeliever long before I was, it was her struggle to die, when her MS, and the misery and pain and indignities associated with it, became so intolerable, that opened my eyes to the fact that, even for a liberal “believer” of the “Sea of Faith” sort, there were moral issues of great importance that I had simply overlooked by the general institutional support that accompanied my membership in, and action on behalf of, a specific religious institution. This stood out for me in stark relief the moment Elizabeth tried to take her own life, and failed, thus setting her on a course which would eventually take her to Zurich, where Dignitas, the assisted suicide organisation which accepts foreign applicants, helped her, with great kindness and dignity, to die, as she sought to do.

Elizabeth herself, though many years younger than I, was the formative influence in my life, far more important than schooling or religion. A woman of great integrity, energy, intellect and joy, she offered me unconditional love, and provided the basis for the freeing of my mind from the dead weight and trammels of my past. Though I do not believe in destiny, the shape my life took seemed – because I can only think of my life until the point that Elizabeth and I exchanged our love as but a propaedeutic and forerunner to the fullness of life that I would come in time to know with her – almost predestined, as though we were supposed to meet and fulfil each other’s dreams of love and commitment. This was expressed in a poem I wrote after her death, entitled “Easter Rising,” about an unexpected intimate encounter with Elizabeth very early on the first Easter morning after we had (earlier in the year) first exchanged our vows of love (and, truth be told, shortly before I would go out to celebrate another resurrection, in a more formal, liturgical way). The poem ends on this note:

One flame forever,
as in the snow,
deeply blended,
each to each,
we yielded,
as the sun began to climb,
and, as one, arose together,
that first Easter morn,
enfolded in each other,
a new creation,
of each other born.

Religion, from that point, began to play an increasingly secondary role in my life, and though I continued to function as a priest in the Anglican Church for all the years of our marriage — and was, indeed, more actively involved in the institutional life of the church on a diocesan level – it was perhaps inevitable that, with Elizabeth’s death, my active participation in that ministry should come to an end. I soon realised that “faith,” for me, had become not only very tenuous, but, indeed, an impediment to clarity of thought and fullness of life. I remember with great affection, however, the years I spent as a priest, and the people I served and learned to care for and admire during all those years, especially those years of priesthood which I shared with Elizabeth, who taught me (for the first time in my life) what it is to love and to be loved in return. It was when the beliefs of the church began to have an immediate impact on the life of the one I held most dear, that close relationship with the church, and participation in its official ministry became intolerable. It is important to recognise that church does not truly acknowledge the right of its members to value things differently than these things are valued through the church’s institutional expression; and being an active and supporting member of the church is in fact to uphold and defend those values, even when one most strenuously disagrees.

You may continue reading this post over at Free Thought Blogs.

_____________

*That it was largely written by Dworkin is my judgement, at any rate, basing myself purely on stylistic grounds.

Are there any religious experts? “Religion experts” on euthansia

Standard

This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks again go to Malgorzata.

…………………………………………..

The Ottawa Citizen has an advice column which puts questions to so-called “religion experts,” who give answers on crucial issues facing individuals and society. There is a big problem with this, because religion experts are, almost by definition, not religion experts at all. What is there to be expert about? They might be experts in their own religion, but there is no such thing as a religion expert who is qualified to give religion’s answer to any question. A recent column in the Citizen’s “Ask the Religion Experts” column, for 31 January 2012 — thanks to Veronica Abbass for the link – asks the two questions: “Is euthanasia right? Would God want us to suffer?” And then the religion experts weigh in on the side of their favourite god. The nonsense that this makes of the questions should be clear right from the outset. We ask the experts their opinion, and all they can do is refer to the “experts” of their religion. According to Z, this is the way it is; according to Y, the truth is such-and-such, and so on. And, around the edges, a little lie or two will take you over the hump when reason fails.

The first one is perhaps the funniest. It’s by a Bahá’í scholar, Jack McLean. Seeing him described as a scholar reminds me of the day I took my M.Div. degree diploma and cut it to shreds. I no longer consider that to be a degree at all. It qualified me as an Anglican priest, but it no longer seems to me that there was anything to know, except, of course, historically, for the church does have a history (or perhaps I should say the churches have a history, for there is no point, during the whole history of Christianity, where there was an unquestioned unity within Christianity), but it is impossible to be a scholar of religion itself, for religion has no subject matter. The “theo” part of theology (the word ‘theology’ meaning, roughly, the logos of theos, or the reason, knowledge of god) is simply UA (on unauthorised absence), having departed his post, or, rather, never having been there in the first place, for all the confident pretence of religious believers, especially its officer class, to which, largely, the Ottawa Citizen has appealed for enlightenment upon a subject which has no object.

Continue reading →

Called Home?!

Standard

When tragedy strikes: that’s when people start talking nonsense about god (let’s keep that lowercase). In a HuffPo piece on the Newtown tragedy, Edward Blum suggests silence:

Perhaps in this moment “sigh” is better than childish theology; perhaps to remain attentively quiet is what God would ask of us — because that is what God seems to do too.

And who can doubt that silence in the face of the incomprehensible is better than lies or nonsense? But what is this “that is what god seems to do too” doing here? What sense does this make? After all, has Blum ever heard god speaking on other occasions? Why is god silent when things are going badly, but good fortune is taken as a good word from god? Yesterday, the religious idiots got in their silly words about god’s unwillingness to protect children, because we don’t pay him his due. According to them, god is not being silent at all. His message is loud and clear. Start praying in your schools or else!

Now, it’s interesting that everyone has their own take on what god’s message is in situations like this. Blum thinks god has gone silent. All he has is a sigh. Huckabee thinks that god is a figure of malice and violence, who kills children if we don’t worship him by setting aside a moment or two each morning to pray for the children’s welfare. Otherwise, the kids are in danger of god’s wrath.

The problem is that no one really hears god at all, in good or in ill fortune. They either make up these stories to make a political point, or to comfort people who cannot be comforted, or just to keep our attention focused on our own failures, so that we don’t notice that god is really just an empty vessel which we fill with our own hopes and hatreds. But god never acts at all. In the video of the Dawkins-Lennox debate which I mentioned yesterday (and from which I took Lennox’s convenient lie), Lennox expressed his unwillingness to believe that god didn’t intervene at some point in the evolutionary process so that we are toto caelo distinct from the other living things that populate this earth. It’s a bit like Pope Wojtyła’s ontological saltation. At some point in the evolutionary process, he suggested in his address to the Pontifical Academy of Science, god intervened and injected a soul into human beings. When Dawkins asked Lennox at what point god might have done this, whether at the time of archaic Homo sapiens or more recently, Lennox, of course, had no answer. But his belief in eternal life requires that it must have been done — what would be the point of granting eternal life to bugs and bacteria? – so it has to be posited. There must be an ontological difference, detectable or not.

Continue reading →

This, really, is all about Elizabeth II

Standard

Now that you know Elizabeth and me a little better (see “This, really, is all about Elizabeth I“), I can go on to speak about the things that now concern me. I would not be here at all, however, had it not been for Elizabeth, not only because I loved her and she died in extraordinary circumstances, but because she was herself so clear about her disbelief, because she was so determined to take her dying into her own hands, and because she wanted me to speak about our love and about the right to die. Religion simply was not a factor in this, and she was pleased when I told her that I was no longer able to believe, not even in the very attenuated way in which I had managed, up to that time, to speak of my state of mind as one of belief. Expressing my own non-belief meant that she no longer felt the need to have a religious service just to please me, so she set about designing her own service, so that people should know that she had not been a person of faith.

And she encouraged me, when I returned from Switzerland, to join in the campaign for the right to die. It is one way in which the love that we knew can continue in other ways, and perhaps influence other lives.

So, then, to business. I do not purport to understand fully why it is that Christianity has made assisted dying and abortion the points at which it is determined to make its final stand, but I think it has to do with the dynamics of religious belief and its need for control over social order. I also think that if we defeat it in this, it will have much less power and influence than it has now.

Religion’s determination to hold onto the entrances and exits of life has to do, I believe, with something absolutely central to religious belief, which is also the source of the idea of the sanctity of human life. As I have experienced it, religion is deeply concerned with notions of order: cosmic order, social order, and the order and integration of the individual life in relation to others, and especially, as religions teach, in relation to God, the ordering principle – as it is supposed – of the universe.

[An aside: "Theologists" (as she is often titled) like Karen Armstrong tell us that religion is not about belief, but about practice, and she even pretends that the etymology of the Latin word 'credo' (I believe) is relevant to its English equivalent. 'Credo' in Latin is related to the words 'cor' (or heart) and 'donum' (to give as a gift), so that 'credo' would mean to give one's heart to God, to enter into a relationship with God, and so on, as though, when it is used in the Nicene Creed, for example, it does not come with any cognitive strings attached. This is pure subterfuge. No one should think that there is no relational-emotional component in an act of faith, but to suggest that there is no intellectual content is simply false. When the gospel Jesus asks: "Who do men say that I am?" and "Who do you say that I am?", he is clearly inviting a confession of faith in terms of an explicit belief about his relationship to God.]

Returning to the question of levels of order: cosmic order, social order, and the order of the individual in relation to others, the cosmos, and especially in relation to God, the ordering principle of the cosmos. At each of these levels religions like to impress upon believers that the ordering principle that runs through all things is the power to which religion pays its dues in worship and obedience. In some simpler religions this aspect of religious belief and practice is more obvious and more dramatic – as when sacrifices are made to the ruler of the universe in order to guarantee the preservation of that order in the regularity of the seasons and the orderly procession of the sun across the sky. In such religions the raison d’être of these ceremonies was brutally clear, as in the Aztec offering of still beating human hearts to the sun with the apparent purpose of preserving the sun in its wonted diurnal course above a fruitful earth.

Continue reading →

This, really, is all about Elizabeth I

Standard

As I mentioned in a short post yesterday, I found blogging on the road uncongenial. Quite aside from being tired out from the day’s activities, I simply found the strange surroundings an impediment to clear thought, though I had many interesting and helpful conversations with those at the conference. I guess I’m just a “stay-at-home” type of guy now that I am starting into my seventies, and no longer have my beloved companion to journey with me. Anyway, today I am going to begin the process of putting up the whole of my presentation to the Eschaton Conference in Ottawa, since I didn’t get the chance to do it on Saturday afternoon, as I had hoped. I think what I did say had some effect and I had some positive feedback, but I was uncomfortable, because I could see that my presentation was too long, and I am not good at speaking off the cuff, especially to a group of people about personal things. So, in this post I am going to put up the first half of the presentation, and tomorrow I will provide the second half, so that you will have the whole to chew on for a while. It is, even for me, as I see now, too long, even though it is slightly less than half the length of my first try at it. The presentation as a whole has the title “This, really, is all about Elizabeth.” This is Part I. It is, really, a story about how Elizabeth and I fell in love, and what that meant to us, and, of course, in this context, especially to me. This is important, I hope you can see, because, in fact, religion was doing in my life something that only love could provide – not the imagined love of a god, but the real life-giving love of a flesh-and-blood human being.

I owe so much to Elizabeth that being able to speak about our love is very important to me, and to what I do here on the blog and elsewhere. Unlike Jerry Coyne’s great website, Why Evolution is True, ceci est un blog, et aussi un website. Il ne fait aucune différence. This link will take you to Jerry’s website, where he has an article about Jesus Christ lizards!

——————–

This, really, is all about Elizabeth – I

In order to understand what I have to say, and why I say it, you need to know something about Elizabeth and me, how we came together in love, and how that coming together transformed my life. I say that this is really all about Elizabeth, because Elizabeth was the one bright spot in an otherwise ordinary and unhappy life. She was transformative, and whatever I am now is a product of the love that we shared for nearly twenty years. Besides that, Elizabeth wanted me to tell others of our love, because that is what gave her life meaning, and she knew that that is what made my life possible, after years of emptiness. Since I owe so much to her, I felt that I needed to fulfil her wish, and tell others about something that was so important to her. In her journal she spoke of me getting published about our love, and said that that was her wish. So, this is, really, all about Elizabeth. Among other things, then, I need to tell you about her, how I came to love her, and how she became such a vital part of my life.The meaning and purpose of life did not, for me, come from religion. That’s worth saying twice. Meaning and purpose in life did not, for me, come from religion. It all began with Elizabeth. This is not hyperbole, but simple fact, and, interestingly, Elizabeth felt the same way. When we came together, suddenly, for both of us, life began to make sense, though suffering would later test the limits of the sense that love made of our lives. My life had always been saturated by religion, so it had lots of chance to make a difference, but it contributed nothing at all to the sense that life had purpose or direction. Indeed, for the most part, it did not. In the light of what people say about the value of religion, this, it seems worthwhile to point out, is not necessarily the way that religion functions for everyone.

Continue reading →