Interesting piece by Jack Miles in the new issue of The Atlantic Monthly about “Why God Will Not Die”, worth reading in its entirety, though what struck me most was the quote he included from Polish thinker Leszek Kolakowski, from his essay “The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture” (1973), ht AZ:
Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. That it is not an inevitable defeat is a claim that cannot be defended in good faith. One can, of course, disperse one’s life over the contingencies of every day, but even then it is only a ceaseless and desperate desire to live, and finally a regret that one has not lived. One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is sense beyond that which is inherent in human history—if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred.
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