The Sum.

ETHANOL is a poison yet a little is not a little delightful. Is it for the sugar that our apish forbears swung down to the jungle floor, pawed up some rotting fermenting apples, and enjoyed their first experience of cider? Did the brain evolve to allow drunkenness or does drunkenness exploit the brain? Sodium too is deadly toxic and chlorine, but put together we shower them in tandem on our every meal. Is that predicated by the categorising philosopher? Perhaps the universe is guilty of making category mistakes, or perhaps the category workers are guilty of dullness? As Chesterton so acutely described, the universe is a trap for fools, seeming logical but laughing at our very logic. So we see a perfect square, a circle, a triangle, an oval, until we look closely enough and realise we see—nothing of the kind. How apt a description this might be of all false conviction! Had it been for analytic philosophy and risk assessments we never would have touched salt with a barge pole, in the way that atheists never think to touch theism. They see the elements of it being superstition and wishful-thinking, but the compound is beyond its reactants, and it makes life worth living—which it frankly is not otherwise. For there is no feeling in atheism, there is no love, only derision and superciliousness, the arrogance of certainty, the folly of impunity. When I think of my beloved grandmother on her death bed, that I never may see her again by the microscopic logic of these people, I must think of mercy, I must dwell on love, I must forego conceit, I must have faith.