Religious sense of life pt 2

Lefty cleric - an oxymoron if ever there was one - called Giles Frasier was on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the day which section is no doubt statutorlily mandated as a precondition of the BBC's  broadcasting licence (although we are forever told that the institution is independent of the State!), was using his platform as an excercise in self therapy to the nation about his periodic bouts of depression and apart from the narcissistic tedium implicit in the excercise is was a timely reminder that those of the faith disposition are by no means immune to the Churchillian black dog except of course they can pass it off as a higher, mystical form of depression namely 'the dark night of the soul'. And so he used it thus in his tortured rationale to interpret it as an opportunity to sit it out and wait for the beneficence of his merciful creator to lift his burden of helplessness.

All depression will lift after a while and to attribute it to a mystical intervention from another dimension is as dumb as you can get but of course religion elevates dumbness to the dizzy heights of wisdom. Such rationalisations can even be interlarded with the pseudo intellectualism of Christian apologetics and in the process totally abdicating responsibility for one's mental state and contracting it out to a third party, one of the trinity no doubt.

Many of faith relish in castigating the intellect but are quite happy to put it to the service of their religion whenever it is challenged and will resort to the lowest form of casuistry to defend their corner albeit as I abovementioned it is invariably by the the abjectest methods of pseudo intellectualism.Be that as it may the inescapable fact is that if at the most fundamental level of one's belief structure is the notion that one is a piteable creature laid low by its own prideful sinfullness how can one possibly exist as a man but in a state of semi permanent miserable wretchedness, subject to the vicissitudes of unknown arbitrary forces that can buffet you at will,for their pleasure and to test your mental and moral fortitude? One can only be a pessimistic character with a crabapple face waiting for one's inevitable judgement in craven fawning and obsequious supplication.

A BBC reporter of the God persuasion summed it up when asking herself the question 'where is God in Alleppo? Wait for it, he is putting all those people through a living hell to test their faith. Who needs mere earthly psychopaths ladies and gentleman, when confronted with this pure unadulterated cosmic evil?