From the Mail Online: Peter Hitchins describes his journey back to Christianity, and his dispute with his atheist brother Christopher, on the release of his new book, The Rage Against God.
I have, however, the more modest hope that he might one day arrive at some sort of acceptance that belief in God is not necessarily a character fault, and that religion does not poison everything.
Beyond that, I can only add that those who choose to argue in prose, even if it is very good prose, are unlikely to be receptive to a case which is most effectively couched in poetry.
Tip: Ed Veith at Cranach.
The last sentence you quote is fantastic. It reminds me of something I was thinking about recently. We often ask someone to summarize a story, poem, song, play, movie, and that’s understandable and sometimes appropriate, but with poetry and songs particularly (not to mention concerts or art exhibits) there is no summary. To summarize the poem would be to compress it into a grotesque figure which would look only vaguely like the poem. The point of the artwork is not an extracted summary. The point of good art is the experience of the artwork.
So if Christianity is more like the reading of a poem than than the understanding of an argument, than the critics who wants certain answers will never find them, even though there are abundant answers to experience.
Yes, I believe you’re onto something there. Must ponder.
Perhaps I should write a post on it, and if I go off the deep end, you can post a rebuttal.
Thanks for sharing this. Very interesting.