For pondering

I'm currently reading the book Original Sin by P. D. James. It's a mystery novel and a good one at that. James is brilliant really. She brings out human misery so naturally; I'd have to say she's got a very good grasp of the human condition really. Anyway, a paragraph about belief that caught my eye, this from the perspective of a Jewish police officer.

"His mother, of course, would never bring herself to say, 'I don't care whether you believe or disbelieve, I want you to be here with us on the Sabbath. I want you to be seen in the synagogue with your father and brother.' And it wasn't intellectual dishonesty, although he tried to tell himself that it was. You could argue that few adherents of any religion believed all the dogma of their faith except the fundamentalists and, God knew, they were a bloody sight more dangerous than any non-believer. God knew. How natural it was an how universal to slip into the language of faith. And perhaps his mother was right, although she would never bring herself to speak the truth. The outward forms were important. To practice religion wasn't only a matter of intellectual assent. To be seen in synagogue was to proclaim: This is where I stand, these are my people, these are the values by which I try to live, this is what generations of my forebears have made me, this is what I am. He remembered his grandfather's words, spoken to him after his bar mitzvah: 'What is a Jew without his belief? What Hitler could not do to us shall we do to ourselves?' The old resentments welled up. A Jew wasn't even allowed his atheism. Burdened with guilt from childhood, he couldn't reject his faith without feeling the need to apologize to the God he no longer believed in. It was always there at the back of his mind, silent witness of his apostasy, that moving army of naked humanity, the young, the middle-aged, the elderly, flowing like a dark tide into the gas chambers."