Belief.

To my dear friend Conrad, this is specially for you.

Off the blog world, I have some friends who follow my posts and prefer to comment through emails rather than to leave comments on the posts. One such friend, a fellow traveller as I call him pointed out these two little nuggets as response to my post Commitment To The Unverifiable.

One – From Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass. The dialogue starts with the White Queen.

“I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“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.”

Amazing insight! Believing in impossible things becomes easy with practice!

Two – From Catch 22.

Friend’s wife: “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He is not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be”

Yossarin:”Let’s have a little more religious freedom between us. You don’t believe in the God you want to, and I won’t believe in the God I want to.”

I don’t even remember when I read this beauty of a book. Perhaps over four decades ago. I think that it is time I went back to read it again.

Another friend sent me this complaint: “My wife treats me like a GOD..!!
She takes NO notice of my existence till she wants something”.

And another friend Keith, in a different context had recommended some time ago that I watch a BBC series The Indian Doctor. It was only in the last few days that I was able to and in the second series of a three series showing, the doctor has to face a wily reverend who preaches the gospel and eventually turns out to be a charlatan. As I was watching the episodes where the priest is talking about faith, I kept remembering the mail from my friend and that has been the inspiration for this post as well. This is a very watchable series and I strongly recommend it to my readers.