A chara, – While John Kehoe (March 18th) rightly congratulates John Waters (Opinion, 16th) on his perspicacious writings on the fundamental vapidity of a secularist worldview, I feel obliged to point out that his understanding of John Waters fails to take into account the paradoxical approach to ratiocination that is crucial to the comprehension of Waters’s convictions.
Resisting all temptations to indulge in verbosity, I believe the most cogent means of summing up Waters’s philosophy of life is as a continual attempt to maintain a dualistic cognisance of existence as both an exoteric mystery that naturally defies any effete attempts at rationalisation, and also an empowering vision of actuality as a transcendent phenomena in which comprehension of the universal nature of being is endowed with a unique sense of paramountcy.
Ulteriorly to this is the paradox that while secularist thinking naturally appeals to a misplaced rationality, which blinds one to the ultimate insolubility of existence, the theistic worldview requires that rationality is superseded by a “rational irrationality”, that although apparently incongruous, provides a superior means with which one can supplant the narrow-minded approach to secular thought. – Is mise ,
PEADAR de BARRA,
North Circular Road,
Phibsboro, Dublin 7.