Not too many people other than Bin Laden and Bush would entertain for too long the thought that they might be infallible. Without my fallibility I wouldn't know what to live for. Once I cease to be fallible I will have, I guess, attained nirvana, which was once described to me as the absence of desire and consequently the absence of suffering. My cocktail-party knowledge of Buddhism tells me that nirvana is the culmination of the cycle of birth and death and this makes perfect sense to me. Of course, since my first question upon hearing that description of nirvana was, "Why should I seek to be free of desire or suffering?" it is safe to assume that I am a long ways from attaining it.

Matthew Zemek at The Right Christians talks about Papal Infallibility. I know even less about Catholicism than I do about Buddhism but I do know little bit about Islam. Says Mr. Zemek:

Invoking papal infallibility is a way of saying, "Times always do change, and with the changing times, so realities and truths also change and emerge. But in the midst of the changes that are taking place now, and which will take place in the future long after we are gone, there are some absolutes and essentials which need to be entrenched into our faith tradition and made a permanent part of the Catholic imagination, practice and outlook."

That is pretty much what they told me (substitute "Muslim" for "Catholic") when, as an adolescent, I questioned the relevance today of the Sharia laws as prescribed in the Quran some 1400 years ago. More recently, I offended some by suggesting that Mohammed was fallible and that such an ordinary person was chosen as the divine messenger speaks volumes about the "progressive" precepts of Islam. Hey, but that's only the opinion of an infidel (to be a Muslim one must believe that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is his messenger).

Earlier this evening on PBS, Leon Kass was talking about his new book on the Book of Genesis:

...it gives you stories which, if you ponder them, take you to the deepest layers of our humanity, show you the elements, psychic and social, of human life, in all their moral ambiguity.

And you're given a kind of panorama of human alternatives to ponder, so that what you have, I think, when you finish this story, is a deepening understanding of why human life is so bittersweet, and what the enduring human problems are. And also, some beginning glimpse of how one might go about addressing them.

While I cannot honestly subscribe to a "faith," I know better than to deprive myself of these stories be they from the Quran or the Bible or the Upanishads or, for that matter, from my mother when she relates to me her memories of her youth. Without them my fallibility would be far too mysterious for me to handle.

--aslam

12:32:46 AM