Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #280 - I am finding your religious turn and proselytising difficult. How do you reconcile your faith with the church’s devastating...

There’s a fascinating On Being interview with Nick Cave from a couple years ago, where he discussed his belief that “ Religion is spirituality with rigor .” Whereas religion actively asks something of us, he explained, spirituality can feel squishier, less demanding and therefore, he implied, less rewarding.

Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: a

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a delusion brought about by our desperate need, or that they are somehow a denial of the finality of death, or, worst of all, they reveal a lack of intellectual integrity. Now, we know that. We fucking get it. But these feelings, indefensible as they may be to rationalists, are real and loving and nourishing, and go some way to being a bridge to no

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