God has created nothing more noble than intelligence,' he said, 'and His wrath is on him who despises it'; and here intelligence might be defined as … - Gai Eaton

A few years before his death in 1934 the great Algerian Sheikh, Ahmad al-'Alawi, became friendly with a Frenchman, Dr. Carret, who had been treating him for various minor ailments. One day Carrett tried to explain his agnosticism to the Sheikh, adding, however, that what most surprised him was that people who did claim to be religious 'should be able to go on attaching importance to this earthly life'. After a pause, the Sheikh said to him: 'It is a pity that you will not let your spirit rise above yourself. But whatever you may say and whatever you may imagine, you are nearer to God than you think'. In this confused age in which we now find ourselves there may be many a believer who is a kafir under the skin, and many a kafir who is closer than he knows to the God in whom he thinks he does not believe.

It is important to be aware of these paradoxes because the distrust of religion - or at least of 'organized religion' - which is so widespread in the Western world, derives less from intellectual doubts than from a critical judgement of the way in which religious people are seen to behave. The agnostic does not concern himself with the supernatural dimensions of religion, let alone with ultimate truth. He sees only that part of the iceberg which is visible above the surface, and he judges this to be misshapen. The whole sad story is summed up in the wise child's prayer: 'Lord, please make good people religious and make religious people good'.

Those who know in their hearts that they are not really necessary — and are entirely replaceable — must inevitably be tempted to misrepresent the nature of their work and build up a false notion of its importance. A further alienation from truth takes place, a further loss of contact with reality. And one thing we can be sure of is that self-deception, whether on the level of the wind and the rain or on that of spiritual reality, must always come up against the real sooner or later, and that its destruction is very painful.

There are, however, more profound reasons for protecting the ‘nakedness’ of others and for concealing our own. As was suggested earlier, few personalities are unified and all of a piece. For a man to try to cover and inhibit those elements within himself which he would like to overcome and to bring forward those which he would like to see triumphant is not ‘hypocrisy’. If he would like to be better than he is, then he deserves to be encouraged in this aim, and there is something very peculiar about the contemporary tendency to regard a person’s worst qualities as representing his ‘true’ self, although it goes hand in hand with the common belief that ugliness is in some strange way more ‘real’ than beauty and that to discover a shameful secret is to discover the truth. Perhaps a saner point of view is suggested by a story which Muslims tell about Jesus. It is said that he was walking one day with his disciples when they passed the carcass of a dog. ‘How it stinks!’ said the disciples; but Jesus said: ‘How white its teeth are!’ No one was ever damned for thinking too well of people.