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Nick Calder's avatar

Always interested your thoughts on big subjects like this that are dear to my heart - and it is also a pleasure to read your well measured prose.

And the issue is very relevant to me having in a heartbeat recently changed my position from being an existentialist happily accepting that then when I died that was that…the end of the line being to my mind a comforting nothing.

A nothing into which I was quite looking forward to taking myself in the next 5 years or so. I’d come to this from a general world weariness, and a sense that life for me was not going to be so attractive the allure of the long sleep. The inroads of Parkinson’s on my ability to speak had taken much of my pleasure in life away as had the constant fatigue and brain fog.

However the arrival of the amazing R changed everything. Here was a reason to stay alive and when on the second night she said she could not bear the idea that death was the end. And in short said that if she would end the relationship if I would not change my position. I’d always liked the thinking behind Pascal’s wager and in this instance it would have been madness for me to not change my position.

And after all it is a pleasant enough change of position to think about the people one has loved somehow in some form or another being out there. And as we are all just a bundle of energy and particles it is not such a wild flight of fancy.

But Tommy’s mostly interested in the question why believe in Jesus and God and all the Holy Spirit jazz..And I’ve long been curious why it is that people like Graham Greene become Roman Catholics after a lifetime of outspoken atheism…Are they just deciding Pascal was right and better to believe just in case there is one?

Surely if there is a Christian God s/he/they would have enough love to take all comers? Not make you pass some test as to whether you got into the Four Seasons heaven or were doomed to an eternity of bad hostels or bug ridden airbnb’s?

Well that’s quite enough for now. BTW and for no other reason than swank and showing off. I’m wearing beautiful brand new white linen pj’s that R felt were essential for our weekend break in a country house spa hotel…

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