The allure of most religious doctrines is nothing more sublime or inscrutable than this: things will turn out well in the end. Faith is offered as a means by which the truth of this proposition can be savored in the present and secured in the future. It is, I think, indisputable that the actual existence of such a mechanism, the fact that uttering a few words and eating a cracker is an effective means of redemption, the certainty that God is watching, listening, and waiting to bestow his blessings upon one and all—in short, the literal correspondence of doctrine with reality itself—is of sole
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