A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Interpretation
True faith must withstand scrutiny; otherwise, it is not valuable.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote emphasizes that genuine faith is tested by the challenges and truths of reality. If a belief cannot endure confrontation with facts or opposing views, then it lacks substantial worth and may ultimately lead to regrets for those who hold onto it.
In practice
In a discussion about personal beliefs during a philosophy class.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.
For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.
Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.
We must want for others, not ourselves alone.
The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped β it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him.
It is better to die of hunger having lived without grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit, amid abundance
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