I would like to declare my commitment to extreme moderation.

Times are tough for moderates – we are being assailed from all sides

On the one hand we have secularists, with whom I have always harboured some sympathy, enforcing the will of atheist fundamentalists and over-turning centuries of tradition. For example in Italy, where I live, a Finnish-born mother recently won a ruling through the European Court of Human Rights to have crucifixes removed from all classes.

Soile Lautsi took her cause to court after failing to get crucifixes removed from the school at which her two children were being taught at a town in north-east Italy.

What a monumental example of egotism, if I may be so immoderate to opine.

Meanwhile, as I wrote last week, 125 Christian leaders have recently put their name to the pompously christened Declaration of Manhattan that calls on signatories to break laws that offend their moral sensibility.

God save us from those who know what is best. 

Fundamentalism is the opposite of God – it is a human thing, born of existential fear. It applies equally to religion and atheism, embodying a need for definitive answers where, in fact, there are none. The fundamentalist’s inherent sense of powerlessness is symbolized by their need to impose their personal power, or righteousness, over others. In their insistent certainty they expose how uncertain they really are. They doth protest altogether too much.

Quantum Mechanics illustrates how particles – the grains of life – appear and disappear with utter unpredictability.

The very fabric of existence is actually woven with uncertainty. In fact, Heisenberg coined the Uncertainty Principle to describe this process.

This, not Latin, Aramaic, English or Arabic, is the actual language of God (or Nogod, if you prefer); the lesson it teaches us is that only uncertainty is the rule.

Ani di Franco sums this up beautifully in her song Paradigm.

I was just a girl in a room full of women
Licking stamps and laughing
I remember the feeling of community brewing
Of democracy happening

But I suppose like anybody

I had to teach myself to see

All that stuff that got lost

On its way to church

All that stuff that got lost

On its way to school

All that stuff that got lost

On its way to the house of my family
All that stuff that was not lost on me
Teach myself to see each of us
Through the lens of forgiveness
Like we're stuck with each other (god forbid!)
Teach myself to smile and stop and talk
To a whole other color kid
Teach myself to be new in an instant
Like the truth is accessible at any time
Teach myself it's never really one or the other
There's a paradox in every paradigm

No one would accuse Ani of being a fuzzy relativist, a knock-kneed apologist. She is in fact a well-known radical. Actually, Ani strikes me as a militant moderate – a healthy skeptic with a keen grasp upon reality. As an artist, perhaps, she exists outside groupthink and perceives the complexities inherent in any absolute, that paradox in every paradigm. But this does not make her indecisive – on the contrary. Understanding, even of uncertainty, clarifies. The truth always illuminates.

Ani was married in a Unitarian Universalist church by the way.

First time around, at any rate. 

Merry Christmas.