By RAY WADDLE Is faith hopelessly irrational, or the ultimate rational choice? Is life a human tragedy or divine comedy? A century ago, a new book about belief unleashed fresh answers to ancient questions, and its zany impact still reverberates. I have been reading it for Lent. Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton, seems too entertaining for Lent’s sober purposes. But leave it to Chesterton to be funny in a dead-serious way. These days his quotes flood the internet: -- “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” -- "He is a (sane) man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head." -- "Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it." -- "The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice." -- "Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of touching a mans heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it." -- "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." -- "I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it." -- "Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish." -- "The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion." -- “I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.” British journalist Chesterton did everything with gusto, if not excess. He wrote incessantly. He weighed nearly 400 pounds. Even his debating rivals admitted he was a man of vigor, surprise and mirth. His writing inspired C.S. Lewis to turn to Christianity. Today Chesterton Societies everywhere pay homage to his spirit. He thought Christian belief a matter of joy and sanity in a mad, mad world. Despite pockets of enthusiasm, the world still nervously evades his sort of religious exuberance. In Orthodoxy, he declares: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” He was irreverently anti-modern. He found the solemn secularism of modernity hilarious. He thought it far more liberal and free-thinking to be free to believe in miracles than to be straitjacketed in rationalistic doctrines that deny life’s every mystery. (No doubt he would look at us moderns as quaintly timid and simple folk who are allowed only one idea at a time – either religion or evolution, either literalism or metaphor.) Chesterton hated concentrations of money and power. He blamed them on a modern, self-defeating denial of the obvious -- sin. Society would be better armed against human evils if it acknowledged the fact of sin. In Orthodoxy he warns that rationalism without humor, charity or poetry leads to madness and oppression. Religion is saner: it’s truer to life’s strangeness. The meaning of the world is found outside the world: Life has an Author. Chesterton had flaws. He inflexibly conceded nothing to modern progress or religious pluralism. At times he idealized the Christianized Middle Ages, a futile dream that made him look anti-Jewish. After the raving Hitler appeared, Chesterton became a stronger defender of Jews. He died in 1936. He did not witness World War II, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, or terrorism’s latest moral bankruptcy. Perhaps these would have disillusioned him, the way millions are disillusioned. But I doubt it. Existence itself was always a shocking wonder to him. It made him grateful for creation, where nothing is trivial because everything holds clues to divine revelation. His religious witness offered a rare mix -- intellectual dazzle and humility. We could some of use both, together, just now.