Provided a man or woman has the right attitude, and tries to do the right thing, shortcomings will be forgiven. There will be grace to cover every sin. The two religions have radically different premises, and it is difficult to see how they can do more than agree to differ. But what are beliefs?
In the professional world it is easy enough to recognize a belief when one sees it, just as it is easy enough to recognize a hopeless case. If an advocate never misrepresents the evidence, and never seeks to put an interpretation on a witnesses’ evidence which it does not arguably bear, then he can say he believes it is worthwhile to be an honest advocate. But if an advocate says, “Of course one should be an honest advocate”, and says it so often that he “believes” it; but every time he opens his mouth in front of a jury, he misrepresents the evidence a little, and again a little more, yet never so blatantly that his opponent can object, then one can say he believes it is worthwhile being a dishonest advocate. The “beliefs” you really believe are the ones you put into practice every day, week in week out, year in year out. Intellectual beliefs to which the mind alone pays lip-service are so pale and shadowy in comparison, that they hardly merit the name “belief” at all. And dogma, which wholly refuses to be open to reason, is something dredged out of the primeval darkness of the human soul.
The original thought in my “Reconciliation with Science and War” is my Theory of Consciousness, in which the basic concept is the “perfectly relaxed consciousness”. There are other theories of consciousness, such as the one that says the way we look at things is dictated by social pressure; which is I imagine an extension of Karl Marx’s dialectic materialism. But such a view can hardly be said to rejoice in the infinite invention of human ingenuity. And mine has the advantage that it is a basic human experience that in a state of complete relaxation, a human being can do absolutely nothing, not even think. Whoever heard of someone running a race, with his body tensed almost to breaking point, and his mind a complete and absolute blank meditating on the wholeness of things? To do anything, even to think, there has to be tension. And social pressure becomes relevant, inasmuch as in every society there is a different type of prevailing tension; or in my metaphor, a different type of hardening of the consciousness. Were it not so, you could not have what we call “national characteristics”, and national languages would be impossible. A child only learns to utter words, as he or she begins to submerge himself into the attitude of mind of the family into which he or she is born. And ultimately this means the nation into which he or she is born.
So inevitably man as he grows from childhood to youth to adulthood, is separated from the spirit of God. This is not a Fall; it is part of the process of growing up, just as it is part of the process of leaving home. Similarly with society, to run any sort of decent society, it has been found in practice that its institutions have to be secular.