Atheists for Christ
From John Mortimer's "Murderers and Other Friends", pp 81 - 82:
(Mortimer on Christianity)
......Although I was not bought up to be religious, and was neither christened nor confirmed, I have always had the greatest respect for a religion which asserted the importance of the individual soul. Believer or unbeliever, I am part of a Christian civilization, with a Christian ethic, a faith in the possibility of redemption and the forgiveness of sins. It also seems to me that total materialism is unbearably drab and that a faith that recognizes the importance of mystery is essential. I envy the Catholic novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and Muriel Spark, whose religion adds shape and weight to their stories; they start with an advantage over the writer who is merely a well-meaning member of the Atheists for Christ Society.......I can't imagine England without cathedrals and village churches, and I'm perfectly happy sitting in the garden arguing with the vicar........my difficulties come with the idea of an all-powerful, all-loving God who not only allows the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing but permits children to die of leukaemia........When Macduff hears of his wife and children's murder, he asks:
'Did heaven look on
And would not take their part?'
It is a question to which neither he nor I have received a satisfactory answer.
(Mortimer on Christianity)
......Although I was not bought up to be religious, and was neither christened nor confirmed, I have always had the greatest respect for a religion which asserted the importance of the individual soul. Believer or unbeliever, I am part of a Christian civilization, with a Christian ethic, a faith in the possibility of redemption and the forgiveness of sins. It also seems to me that total materialism is unbearably drab and that a faith that recognizes the importance of mystery is essential. I envy the Catholic novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and Muriel Spark, whose religion adds shape and weight to their stories; they start with an advantage over the writer who is merely a well-meaning member of the Atheists for Christ Society.......I can't imagine England without cathedrals and village churches, and I'm perfectly happy sitting in the garden arguing with the vicar........my difficulties come with the idea of an all-powerful, all-loving God who not only allows the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing but permits children to die of leukaemia........When Macduff hears of his wife and children's murder, he asks:
'Did heaven look on
And would not take their part?'
It is a question to which neither he nor I have received a satisfactory answer.
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