The thing about faith is that, in the end, it’s unfalsifiable. You either have it or you don’t. But even within the community of the faithful there must be room for doubt. Indeed it’s the doubt that often proves the faith.
The late Neil MacCormick (praise be upon him, etc), once suggested there were two kinds of Scottish nationalist. The existential, come-what-may, nationalist and the utilitarian, evidence-weighing, nationalist. It was, and remains, a cute distinction.
Unfortunately, for the most part, it is also bogus. A man – or, indeed, a woman – may start as a utilitarian nationalist but by the end of his cost-benefit analysis he is likely to have become an existential nationalist. If the facts change, his mind would not. The ballyhooed journey only goes in one direction and there’s only rarely a way back.
That’s fine and it should be noted that there are, of course, Unionists for whom the preservation of the Union – of their other country – is a faith-based proposition impervious to calculator-based analysis too.
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