Abstract
THAT SUNDAY IN SEPTEMBER ostensibly began for me like many others since I had been a curate at St Cuthbert’s Church, Billingham. I arose early. Few people were about. To my back was the huge chemical works that employed the parishioners and poisoned the air. In front of me was a scene from the country I could see the row of cottages, uneven with age, including the one I lived in. At the end was the handsome vicarage with its own drive. And then there was the Saxon church itself, so old that some of its stones had been moved to the British Museum on account of their Celtic inscriptions.
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!
George Meredith
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Further Reading and References
Atheism: a Very Short Introduction, by Julian Baggini, is published by Oxford University Press (2003): see page 106 for the quote. In What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, published by Granta (2004), he offers an atheist’s take on the ‘big questions’.
Denys Turner’s lecture ‘How to Be an Atheist’ is in his collected talks Faith Seeking, published by SCM Press (2002).
Philosophy: the Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions, by Nicholas Fearn, is published by Atlantic Books (2005).
Herbert McCabe is quoted in The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, by Brian Davies, published by Clarendon Paperbacks (1993), page 111.
Karen Armstrong discusses her ideas on logos and myth in The Battle for God (see above). A concise version is in A Short History of Myth, published by Canongate (2005): see page 122 for quote.
Serious Concerns, by Wendy Cope, is published by Faber and Faber (1992).
Disciplining the Divine: the Failure of the Social Model of the Trinity, by Paul Fletcher, is published by Ashgate (forthcoming).
No God But God: the Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam, by Reza Alsan, is published William Heinemann (2005), see page 263 for quote.
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© 2007 Mark Vernon
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Vernon, M. (2007). Bad Faith: Religion as Certainty. In: After Atheism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-28903-1_5
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