Chris Hedges is one of the political writers that I like. (Even though he sometimes goes over the top, and he does too much moralizing.) Here is a short description of his faith, from his book American Fascists, bashing the religious right:

God is inscrutable, mysterious and unknowable. We do not understand what life is all about, what it means, why we are here and what will happen to us after our brief sojourn on the planet ends. We are saved, in the end, by faith—faith that life is not meaningless and random, that there is a purpose to human existence, and that in the midst of this morally neutral universe the tiny, seemingly insignificant acts of compassion and blind human kindness, especially to those labeled our enemies and strangers, sustain the divine spark, which is love.

This isn’t just Hedges; many of his fellow graduates of liberal seminaries will express similar views.

I’m not exactly sure what all this means—I suspect there’s a lot of well-crafted obscurantism lurking in these phrases—but it’s impressively resistant to criticism. After all, it acknowledges the impersonal nature of the universe. It still seeks some magic to human compassion, and it is a view that seems all too ready to seek divine sparks in what we don’t fully know. But all this is quite vague, difficult to translate into concrete observations. It’s more of a hope, a desire for meaning, than any well-defined fact claim.

To the extent that all this is a hope, it’s also hard for me to figure out what’s wrong with it. It’s a bloody stupid hope, perhaps, when we’re talking about cosmic purpose. But this hope also seems very tightly woven into Hedges’s conception of acting morally; perhaps without it, he’d have little option but to fall into despair. And that seems impractical at best.

I don’t really know what to make of all this, I guess.