I don’t want to get in to the pros and cons of Sharia Finance, which are discussed at length in the original post. What interests me is how faith can cross the boundary between private and public.

Persephone scrupulously, and wisely, sticks to the subject despite the comments of those who mischievously attempt to move the conversation on to other aspects of Sharia, although there is perhaps a certain sense of mischief on Persephone’s part too – her argument that Islamic Finance, “based on Sharia Law”, is long-established in the UK and basically bailing the country out of the current rough waters is somewhat tendentious.

Increasingly religion is moving in to the public realm. Yes we debate Sharia Law, but so too do registrars refuse to marry Gays, and so too do Unitarians campaign for everyone to have equal rights. All of it is about the private stepping in to the public.

Kierkegaard contended that because each of us has a different, and absolutely unique, experience of being alive, then the spiritual will mean something different for us all. This is why, although I’m not against my idea of God crossing in to the public realm, I want to be absolutely confident about its provenance.

Sharia Finance appears a perfectly good idea for example, but that does not mean all other aspects of Sharia Law are. The fundamentalist Christianity of the type practiced by the refusenik registrars can also sometimes do good, providing assistance and a sense of belonging for the vulnerable and dispossessed. We should not forget that baby in the bathwater.

The divine may be beyond comprehension yet we nonetheless try to comprehend it, fit it in to our human-shaped box, and being humans – just clever animals really, with tremendous limitations – it soon comes to reflect not the brilliance we sense but our own short-comings. I have little doubt for example, that much of Sharia Law was progressive for its time, yet time moves on; is it really necessary for today’s Christians to act out prejudices formed by tribal conditions 5000 years ago?

Even today, well last year to be precise, the President of the American Unitarians, William Sinkford, met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and contrasted him favourably to the then President Bush, who certainly had his faults but did not preside over a totalitarian regime of violent homophobia, religious and political repression, and anti-Semitism. Sinkford too was guilty of allowing his prejudices – a certain Liberal American (fast-becoming British) mind-set trapped within a cognitive cage every bit as rigid as that of a fundamentalist Baptist – to ignore the objective truth.

Our prejudices imprison us, yet the cage can be cosy too – its bars may keep us in, but they also protect us from what is outside. They create the comforting illusion of control – of systems, design, intent – when in fact they insulate us from the only inescapable certainty, death.

In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus insists the truth is inside and outside of us. I interpret this to mean self-knowledge includes understanding where the self ends; that the light of truth is without as well as within, and only by stepping tremulously in to the open will we see ourselves, and the world, in full.

And only then should we consider ourselves ready to decide what is right for others.