Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Sometimes things go wrong, and life seems pointless. But then at other times our lives do seem to have meaning. For example, life sometimes seems to have taken a wrong turn -- we fail an exam, lose a job or a love affair ends -- but then we find our true métier or true love as a result of this seeming wrong turn. Or it happens that someone decides against boarding a plane, which then crashes. If something like this happens, we may feel as if 'someone up there' is looking after us, that our footsteps have been guided. We may have a heightened sense of the precariousness of life, how easily things could have turned out differently had it not been for an almost imperceptible, perhaps otherworldly nudge.


Similarly with the down-to-earth, science-oriented part of ourselves we may see a coincidence as a chance coming together of related events, but sometimes deep down we suspect that a coincidence is not a matter of chance at all. In coincidences we sometimes feel we catch a hint, albeit an elusive one, of a deep pattern of meaning hidden behind the muddle of everyday experience.


And sometimes people find that just when all hope seems lost, happiness is discovered the other side of despair, or that inside hatred hides the growing germ of love. For reasons we'll look at later, questions of happiness are these days closely connected with notions of sexual love, so that it is often the experience of falling in love that gives us the sense that 'this was meant to be'.


~ The Secret History of the World, Jonathan Black


:) This made me happy, and then it made me pity atheists such as Richard Dawkins and that unbelievable snob, Christopher Hitchens. (Usually, they irritate me with their generally condescending manner.) Because if they fail to see such things, it's more sad than it is stupid. Maybe behind it all, they simply had a terrible heartbreak that they couldn't recover from, and therefore lost all hope in anything good from heaven. Like the Quran conveys, God is as you think He is. If you insist on not believing in Him, then He will not be made manifest to you. Why do that to yourself.

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