Rest or Rules?

The above cartoon by David Hayward seems to me to make much the same point as Dostoyevsky’s famous parable of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. Some people find freedom to be a burden, and prefer what rules offer: in particular, the sense that we are passing the responsibility for our views and our decisions to someone else. But of course, that sense is an illusion – the fundamentalist is still deciding what to believe, and is only pretending to merely believe “what the Bible says” or even “what God says.”

Click through to see David’s list of why law is often felt to be preferable to love, when it comes to our guiding principles.