A belief, the dictionary says, is
the “mental acceptance of something as true or credible.” Beliefs are deeper than feelings, opinions,
or prejudices. My beliefs are tempered
by warming my hands over the fires of five decades of life. “The heart has reasons that reason cannot
know,” says Pascal, and it may be that the convictions I hold are for reasons
that I don’t know. Perhaps the Queen in
“I can’t believe that!” said
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a
pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long
breath, and shut your eyes.”
“
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,”
said the Queen. “When I was your age, I
always did it for half-an-hour a day.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before
breakfast.”
I’m also aware that good people may hold
different beliefs than my beliefs. I’m
not writing this book to either make other people happy or sad, but to simply
clarify and communicate what I believe.
My beliefs change, and perhaps the beliefs I’ve set forth here will
change. But here is what I believe right
now. I hold to some of these beliefs
with the deepest conviction. Other
beliefs I embrace tentatively and speculatively. I don’t think my beliefs are especially
profound, as many other people have said the same things using different words. You may even think that some of what I’ve
written is nonsense. But, for better or
worse, these beliefs are what I am, which is sometimes nonsense. I suppose that some of my views are out of
the mainstream, but non-conformity is a Wik tradition going back many
generations, and that’s a badge I wear with honor.
I affirm faith. I also affirm doubt. I’m a skeptic of faith, as well as a skeptic
of skepticism. Some of my beliefs may
seem contradictory. I’m pessimistic
about scientists, politicians, and my job.
But I’m optimistic about myself, my family, and my ability to find
another job. I’m pessimistic about
churches but optimistic about the decency of most folks. I deny the essentially goodness of man but I
also deny the essential goodness of priests and preachers. I believe that all saints are guilty until
proven innocent and that all sinners can be saints. My study of history teaches me pessimism, but
I remain optimistic about myself and the future. My beliefs, like Christianity itself, are a
paradox, which is the sum of paradoxes.
“Its passion mounts, like a surge of music, insubstantial and
sustaining, between two great cries of the spirit—the paradoxical sadness of
‘Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief’ and the paradoxical triumph of Tertullian’s ‘Credo quia impossibile’ (I believe
because it is impossible.),” Whittaker Chambers wrote in an essay on Reinhold Niebuhr.
“Religiously, its logic, human beyond rationality, is the expression of
a need epitomized in the paradox of Solon weeping for his dead son.
“Why do you weep,’ asked a friend,
‘since it cannot help?
Said Solon: “That
is why I weep—because it cannot help.”