Yes, JP, ultimately - when the universe suffers a heat death or collapses back in on its self or whatever happens tens or hundreds of billions years down the track - none of this will have mattered at all.

But so what?

It at least matters to us now and either way, none of this says anything about whether or not a God actually exists, so I don’t know why you bother continuing down this track unless this is some sort of a “My worldview’s better than yours” thing.

Do you think that this means your religious worldview is somehow more deep or meaningful or has more value? The fact that the ultimate meaning and purpose in your religious worldview is unsubstantiated actually makes it less so - not to mention dangerous, ironically. Yet it seems, according to your philosophy, that if Gods and an afterlife don’t exist, then we’d be wise to invent them and convince ourselves of the truth of them regardless.

What a dishonest and shallow philosophy to have on life.

Thanks for your musings, Peter Sellick, but rather than making your Calvinist anti-rationalism look like a genuine alternative, by fleshing out the doctrine of Messianism you seem to favour, you summarily demonise rationalism. Without depth, your position looks like defeatism; resignation to a purgatorial human condition, rather than faith in hermeneutical destiny; that is, "a protological-eschatological perspective of meaning-disclosure" that guides but also transcends foundationless-rationalism. The trouble with rationalism, after all, is it's indifferent. Yet rather than being objective, it adapts to and serves any ideology that comes along. Liberal-rationalism, for instance, rationalises the free market--but anything can be rationalised. So, follow-up articles that argue the flaws and even futility in Enlightenment though, and the benefits of following a pre-ordained destiny, are in order.
For myself, I'm persuaded that humanism is the way to go, but that we need to devote rationalism to a revised and reflexive ethical agenda. Would you have it that we'd ignored the plague, and all the other ills that flesh is heir to? Beseeched God rather than sought a cure? It seems to me our bridges were burned when we were necessarily ejected from the garden of Eden, and all the evidence since then suggests God's grace won't help us on Earth. We have to help ourselves, to use those great brains God gave us??

In any case, unless you go into some theological depth, you've just propping-up a straw-man for your opponents to knock down.

rationality alone is inadequate to the challenges of transforming the world.

We need to stop the transformation that is the challenge.

Sells, a welcome contribution by you again.

Reason without revelation delivers coldhearted rationalism that seeks to fill human deficiency with rationalist groupspeak and associated laws and tribunals. Dangerous stuff.

In my view the Prologue of St John's Gospel is one of the finest pieces of literature written. It places reason, Logos, as a unifying presence through the created universe. It means the universe is understandable and underpins the hope in discovery by man. What is true is good and bound with beauty.

Our story over time displays man has taken up this task of discovery well. However when it is disconnected from the Logos and man places himself at the centre of all, we engage again in the Babel exercise with cold hearted rationalism driving man apart - all for good reason of course!!

In the beginning was the Word (Logos)
The Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things came to be;
not one thing had its being but through him.
All that came to be had life in him,
and that life was the light of men.
A light that shines in the dark,
A light that darkness could not overcome .....
... the Word was made flesh, he lived among us.

To believe that a man, Jesus of Nazareth, can be God is a position solely of faith. It is a proposition that can of course be open to a charge of absurdity. Fair enough. It is mystery, but not irrational as He is the Logos, the very reality of reason. Belief in the proposition without the balance of reason, which it contains, can be troublesome as it reflects dogmatic behaviour.

Christians engage in a world that is explainable with reason. That reason is "of God". When reason is cut off from God it is as dangerous and mad as the sectarian / fundamentalist religious behaviour railed against by secular rationalists . They need to move the log from their eye to reflect on Matt 7:3 about their own practice of narrow judgement.

Don't get your hopes up, boxgum -- I suspect that Peter is just as much of a rationalist as the rest of us at heart. I'm sure if he thought he could convince others that his faith was logically defensible, he would be exhorting us to examine the evidence and rationally infer the conclusions it led to. The only problem for him is that it's not.

So how do you manage to spread a belief when you can't convince anyone else that there are reasons to hold it? Why, slander the whole idea of holding rational beliefs, of course. And the fact that nobody has ever accurately explained, predicted, created or designed ANYTHING other than on rational principles gets swept under Peter's increasingly lumpy carpet.

One of the things I find objectionable about the likes of Mr Sellick is the notion that because humanity is fallible, it cannot be improved. While he is busy demonising the work of the various commissions that seek to uphold minimum standards of human behaviour, he seems to forget that this has been, precisely, the role of religion. Theft, murder, adultery, etc all seem to be evolutionary advantages for the strongest of the species; yet religion everywhere has imposed sanctions against these practices with an ultimate arbiter in a vaguely defined yet immensely powerful deity or deities. Why should religions enact such sanctions if there is not, ultimately, some possibility of improving humanity?

If there is one trait that the religious and the rationalist share, it is the belief in the absolute degeneracy of the species. We are equally condemned by past practice and future hopes until we dwell in this middle place, bereft of heroes to inspire us to do better; wallowing in a pathetic resignation of rampant consumerism and political and social apathy, convinced that we can do nothing ourselves to change the world around us.

In addition, one might suggest that the Edith's clinging to the wreckage of the League of Nations may not be as pathetic as it seems- it is the vision of hindsight that presupposes that the failure of the League ultimately gave rise to the UN. Had the League not shown a vision of what could be, the UN would never have happened. If it did nothing else, it at least gave us that. It was people like Edith, who continued working and believing that the League still had something to offer, that kept that dream alive. How sad that people like her can now only be remembered as delusional and pathetic.