Cottesbroke : 

Revd. Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carrol.:

Alice:  " There's no use trying to   -   one can't believe impossible things"
Red Queen: 	"  I dare say you haven't had much practice.... ........When I was younger I always did it for half an hour a day.  Why,  sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast " 
I've been reading and hearing a lot about belief recently.   Everyone seems to be into it, including very loudly those who profess to have no beliefs at all.  Religious belief to me means a settled conviction about why we are here, where we are going and whether good or evil are merely functions of a given social order devised by leaders, writers and philosophers or ultimate forces in our lives.  
Nihilism  -  the belief in nothing established  -  is not really possible in my view.  Everyone believes something.  If you press a switch and the light goes on, you believed that would happen.  You put your trust in that belief; you didn't have to verify it for yourself by tracing and testing the electric wires. 
Religious belief is not so much a concept like life after death, or eternal judgement, rather it puts us as individuals in a universal context with everything that is around us, and gives life meaning.   That is why it has been so popular throughout history.
Religious belief is not a fact, however, : it needs continuous reassertion.  Most of us have doubts to overcome. 
And here's an example. 
 Lesley Hazelton -  British  born author, student of early Islam  and Koran 
  Carlyle:   " As toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble "   
Very topical today in the Middle East/. Syrian massacres/ Isil  horrors.  Muslims abroad and at home in the daily news. 
 
 H. researched  what happened on the night in  610 AD when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain just outside Mecca.  She describes this as the core mystical moment of Islam, and as such, of course, it defies empirical analysis
Hazelton :   "  A human encountering the divine, as Muslims believe Muhammad did  or Christians believe Moses did:  to the rationalist, this is a matter not of fact but of wishful fiction, and like all of us, I like to think of myself as rational.  
" Which  might be why when I looked at the earliest accounts we have of that night, what struck me even more than what happened was what did not happen. Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air. He did not run down shouting, "Hallelujah!" and "Bless the Lord!" He did not radiate light and joy. There were no choirs of angels, no music of the spheres, no elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him, no sense of an absolute, fore-ordained role as the messenger of God. That is, he did none of the things that might make it easy to cry foul, to put down the whole story as a fable. 
"  Quite the contrary. In his own reported words, he was convinced at first that what had happened couldn't have been real. At best, he thought, it had to have been a hallucination ............ At worst, possession -- that he'd been seized by an evil jinn, a spirit out to deceive him, even to crush the life out of him. In fact, he was so sure that he could only be possessed by a jinn, that when he found himself still alive, his first impulse was to finish the job himself, to leap off the highest cliff and escape the terror of what he'd experienced by putting an end to all experience. " 
 " The man who fled down the mountain that night : overwhelmed by doubt. And that panicked disorientation, that sundering with everything familiar, that daunting awareness of something beyond human comprehension, can only be called a terrible awe.  " 
 Difficult to grasp now that we use the word "awesome" to describe a new app or a viral video. With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake, we're protected from real awe.  We think that we're in control, or, at least, hoping for control. 
We do our best to ignore the fact that we don't always have it, and that not everything can be explained. Yet whether you're a rationalist or a mystic, whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night came from inside himself or from outside, what's clear, according to contemporaries is that he did experience them.  As Hazelton says he did so   " with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world and transform this otherwise modest man into a radical advocate for social and economic justice. Fear was the only sane response, the only human response. " 
Some Muslim theologians maintain that the account of his wanting to kill himself shouldn't even be mentioned.  Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection. Yet what, exactly, is imperfect about doubt.  Doubt is essential to faith. 
 As Graham Greene :  doubt is the heart of the matter. 
Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but heartless conviction,  dogmatism.
The arrogance of fundamentalism.  Both Muslim fundamentalists and Christian Crusaders use  "infidel " 
As Hazelton points out,  doubly ironic, in this case, because their absolutism is the opposite of faith. In effect, they are the infidels.
No questions, only answers. Ideal refuge from the hard demands of real faith. They don't have to struggle for it like Jacob wrestling through the night with the angel, or like Jesus in his 40 days and nights in the wilderness, or like Muhammad.
We too often defer to this extremist minority. Judaism claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers, Christianity by homophobic bigots, Islam by suicide bombers etc.  
And, Hazelton argues,  " we've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that no matter whether they claim to be Christians, Jews or Muslims, militant extremists are none of the above. They're a cult all their own, blood brothers steeped in other people's blood. " 
Real faith has no easy answers.. It's an ongoing struggle with issues and ideas. Faith goes hand in hand with doubt. 
Despair is self fulfilling. If something is called impossible we often act in such a way to make it so. 
Faith rejects despair.  Mohammed, Wesley and St. Paul could not have done what they did without faith. 
Mohammed would be outraged by militant fundamentalism, Shia/Sunni conflict that blights the Middle East today. " He'd  say what the Koran says: Anyone who takes a life takes the life of all humanity. "   
John Donne also has this belief. 
Mohammed would surely commit himself to peace. 
" I dare say you haven't had much practice.   When I was younger I did it for half an hour a day.  Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast " 
Water into wine, five thousand fed from a few loaves and fishes, the empty tomb, the miracles of the saints over the centuries.  We need faith we need beliefs. 
I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth and in Jesus Christ his only son our Lord.  And I also believe that whether Christian or Jew or Muslim, or whatever creed, all of us need faith, albeit tempered with doubt, on our journey through life. 

