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| Home » Writings, Speeches, Broadcasts » Credo |
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| G-d does not expect us to get it right all the time |
| 14/8/2010 |
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Guilt is out of fashion these days, like sports jackets, courtesy, humility and handkerchiefs. It has a sepia-tinted Victorian air about it. It belongs, so it seems, to that foreign country, the past. They do things differently there.
For us, when things go wrong, it was someone else’s fault: the boss, the colleague, the system, the government, the media, our parents, the way we were brought up, society, bad luck or our genes. Feeling guilty, they say, is bad for us. ... |
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| The good that we do continues long after our death |
| 17/7/2010 |
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It was a devastating tragedy. A young man, brilliant, gifted, with a devoted wife and two beautiful young children, was diagnosed with leukaemia. For two and a half years, helped by advanced medical technology and lifted by the prayers of friends, he fought with all his strength against the civil war taking place within his body. In the end it was all too much, and two weeks ago he died.
If any of us had been so minded, here was a supreme trial of faith. This was no o... |
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| I found God first as a mystery when I was very young. What fascinated me was the Torah scroll. |
| 19/6/2010 |
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I am sometimes asked, Where did I find God? The answer is surely different for each of us, and this is mine.
I found God, first, as a mystery when I was very young. For the first three years of my life we lived with my mother’s parents as part of a large extended family in Finsbury Park, north London. My grandfather did not serve as a rabbi but he had his own small synagogue (Jews call this a shteibel), and the services there are among my earliest memories.
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| It takes faith to have a child, faith in mankind's purpose |
| 22/5/2010 |
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A while back, in the course of a public lecture, I offered a simple five-part refutation of the new atheism, based as it is on neo-Darwinian principles: the universe is blind, life merely evolves, there is neither transcendent God nor transcending purpose, and so on. I repeat it here because it’s worth genuine reflection. It goes like this:
The first point: if you are a Darwinian, what matters is reproductive success. The rest is mere froth. Forge... |
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| Optimism is all very well, but it takes courage to hope |
| 1/5/2010 |
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Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Bright Sided has been making waves. Subitled “How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America” she points to the absurdity, sometimes even the danger, of seeing only the good in events. And of course, she’s right – up to a point.
The gospel of success and the power of positive thinking have dominated American thinking for a century, in part, Ehrenreich argues, as a reaction against an earler, ... |
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| If faith schools are so bad, why do thoughtful, often secular, parents think they are so good? |
| 27/3/2010 |
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Faith schools – so their opponents argue – are divisive, retrograde, narrow, insular, hostile to science and the critical mind, unable to teach their pupils tolerance, and fundamentally opposed to the values of a free society. These claims are not made lightly, nor should they be lightly dismissed.
But if they are true, there is an obvious question. Why do so many parents want to send their children to such schools? Do they passionately want their children to b... |
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| Why the Ancient Greeks were wrong about morality |
| 27/2/2010 |
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Do you have to be religious to be moral? Was Dostoevsky right when he said, If God does not exist, all is permitted? Clearly the answer is No. You don’t have to be religious to fight for justice, practise compassion, care about the poor and homeless or jump into the sea to save a drowning child. My doctoral supervisor, the late Sir Bernard Williams, was a committed atheist. He was also one of the most reflective writers on morality in our time.
Yet there were great minds who were ... |
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| Better is a world built on love, not Darwinian struggle |
| 23/1/2010 |
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The word “credo”, in Hebrew ani ma’amin, means “I believe”, and it sometimes helps to spell out what we believe, why we do what we do, and why we are what we are. This, briefly, is my credo.
I believe that life has a meaning, that neither we nor the universe are here by sheer happenstance. The search for meaning is definitive of the human condition, for we are the only life forms yet known in all the vast universe capable of asking the question “why?”
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