Unbounded Labyrinth

The universe isn't just a big mystery, it is most likely also a perfect mystery. Why should it be otherwise?

The job of religions has been to provide superficial answers to the key questions arising from this mystery, such as how we ought to live and what the significance is of our deaths. For the devout the dimensions of the core mystery will not appear to have altered much in the past couple of millennia, but the experience of agnostics has been markedly different.

The scientific method was founded on the discovery of important regularities which for long promised a progressive unravelling of the mystery. It was rather like turning left at every junction in the labyrinth. Yet few scientific discoveries delivered by this method in the last century can be said to have narrowed the overall scope of the puzzle. In fact, the more we have progressed the bigger the labyrinth has appeared to be, and we may even have to consider that the centre that we have been working towards is but a local one within a much greater maze.

Eastern spirituality attempts to encompass the 'whole' problem more earnestly than the the monotheistic faiths which, to a greater or lesser extent, underpin a system of denial that diverts believers' attention from the wider web of forking questions.

Since the end of the Middle Ages, Christianity has diversified out of one-dimensional denial. Islam, on the other hand, hasn't - and now, confronted on its most ragged edges by the triumphant decadence of the other ahl al Kitâb (peoples of the book), the Muslim way of denial has hypertrophied with potentially unpleasant consequences for all in a globalised world.