“It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.”

Zoe Heller

Zoë Heller - “It seems to me that my lack of faith is...” 1

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“I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn’t feeling particularly reverent about my mother’s deadness, or about the vicar, but I do despise that ghastly, ‘You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?’ approach to religious occasions. As a young man, I often goaded my believing friends with crudely logical questions about God. But as the years have passed, I have found myself hankering more and more for a little cosy voodoo in my life. Increasingly, I regard my atheism as a regrettable limitation. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather, a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery: a species, in fact, of neurosis. There is no chance of my being converted, of course - it is far too late for that. But I wish it wasn’t.”

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“...Today the lack of faith is an expression of profound confusion and despair. Once skepticism and rationalism were progressive forces for the development of thought; now they have become rationalizations for relativism and uncertainty.”

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“My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.”

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“My instincts told me that death would somehow be…different. But my rational mind reminded me that I had probably tempted fate one too many times. At least, I thought it was my rational mind. It sure seemed like the usual voice inside my head. Thank God there was only one of them.”

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“The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure.”

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