Letters.
By PETER STANFORD is right in maintaining (Weekend Guardian, November 4) that Graham Greene is not alone in calling himself a ' Catholic agnostic '.
An earlier thinker who declined to see any mutual contradiction between similar terms was Leslie Weatherhead, psychologist and cleric, who published his Creed of a Christian Agnostic.
Weatherhead was honest enough to realise that there are many aspects of religion about which one has to remain uncertain, that is, agnostic.
These ' difficult ' areas will vary from one individual to another.
As a self-confessed Christian agnostic he himself, however, was sure of a number of the major tenets of Christianity.
His' creed ' claimed (in part): ' I believe that God exists...
I believe there is mind behind the universe...
Such a mind must be love rather than hate...
I believe in the divinity of Christ...
I believe that sin is a grisly fact in the world...
I believe that God's forgiveness is one of the most blessed and therapeutic experiences and that it is offered to all who seek it...
I believe that our relationship with God is the most important thing in the world...
I believe that each individual is precious to God. '
Within this creed appear supportive rational arguments but also agnostic admissions, such as' I can understand little about that mind ' and ' I do not know what ' divine ' means'.
I imagine that many honest people would sympathise with Weatherhead and happily echo his final paragraph: ' All this gives me as much as I need, and seems to me the essential credo of Christianity.
About the rest I am content to be agnostic. '
Michael J.Smith.
Southampton.
FROM HIS Fifth Dimension article, Peter Stanford sounds even further burnt out than Graham Greene who continues capable of grim religious fun when opportunities arise.
Indeed, Greene's latest revelations about his faith-non-faith appear quite knowingly hilarious.
There's such sad unenthusiasm, on the other hand, about the way Stanford confuses personal doubt with the existence of mystery, as if one engenders the other, and, in doing so, must be assuaged by performance of some farcical rites.
How boring!
How pointless; precisely!
Prayer, whether dramatised in a church or not, usually goes through futile-seeming passages.
But even when extreme and prolonged, they have a strange tickle of meaning in them that becomes more of a mystery as faith grows.
Olive Powell.
Manchester.
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