Baker Street Irregulars discussion

hello everyone.
i am the newest member to the forum and i am happy to meet you.

i have a question.

does Sherlock Holmes believe in higher power?

and does he believe in god or in a goddess?
because i heard he was worshiping Athens, the goddess of wisdom.

at the end of "His Last Bow" Sherlock Holmes says
"there is a storm coming, but its God's wind non the less"
and at the end of "the Bascombe valley mystery" he says
"God help us" "Why does fate play such tricks with poor, helpless worms? I never hear of such a case as this that I do not think of Baxter's words, and say, 'There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes."
also at the illustrious client he said
"The wages of sin, Watson - the wages of sin" "Sooner or later it will always come. God knows, there was sin enough"

and in "The Naval Treaty" he says:

"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."
does that mean that Sherlock Holmes believed in a higher power ?
and does he believe in god or in a goddess?
because i heard he was worshiping Athens, the goddess of wisdom

Holmes may have been a deist, that is, someone who accepts the possibility of a God, but not that nasty old man in the sky poking his nose into everyone's sex life. Holmes is noted for his studies of natural phenomena, and it would be natural for him to hypothesize from that. We don't find Holmes quoting the Bible very often.

Holmes seems to have held different views at different stages of his life. I have discussed the matter in some detail in my blog: http://acaseofwitchcraft.wordpress.co...

In a nutshell, it seems to me that Holmes began as an atheist, then became a Christian (of sorts) in the late 1880’s, because he was troubled by the suffering in the world, and found some consolation in religion; but later, after (and perhaps as a consequence of) his travels during the Great Hiatus, his natural skepticism reasserted itself. Whether he was a believer or not in 1914 is debatable.

I have never heard that he was a devotee of Athena, and I don't consider that there can be any canonical evidence for that (rather appealing) idea.

At the risk of blowing my own trumpet yet again: http://beneathgrayski.es/?p=1486 - my evidence that Holmes was brought up as a Catholic. I believe that Holmes believed in some sort of deity, but it wasn't the conventional Christian deity.

Conan Doyle rejected Catholicism early on. It is unlikely Holmes would have been a Catholic.

Ah, I said he was brought up as a Catholic, not that he stayed one. He would almost certainly have rejected the dogma.

Got it in one.

The question is certainly an intriguing one. I have always been under the impression that he was a christian of some sort, but perhaps in a more intellectual sense than religious, and that he would have steered clear of the more superstitious tendencies of many religions for the more practical and private habits of faith, which in its simplest form can be only this: believe God and do what he says. We already know that Holmes had a strong sense of justice, and of right and wrong. The very basis of justice and morality comes from religion, and ultimately from God. The bible can easily be intellectualized for the sake of these very things, which is something that I think would appeal to Holmes, when stripped of the accoutrements given to all religion by men; such things as ceremony, pomp and -- as I mentioned already -- superstition. Things commonly found at their strongest in the catholic church, which I agree he would have been unlikely to subject himself to.

I doubt Holmes was god-fearing or religious simply for the fact that he wouldn't have seen worrying about whether or not there was a god as pressingly relevant to his specific line of work. The man didn't care if the Earth revolved around the Sun.

We know that Holmes was schooled in religion, as most educated gentlemen were - in The Musgrave Ritual, he refers to his experience at university when Trevor's dog seized him by the ankle when he was going down to chapel.

He alludes to scripture in The Speckled Band and The Crooked Man - in the latter he says that his "Biblical knowledge is a trifle rusty." In A Scandal in Bohemia", where he is an accidental witness to Irene Adler's marriage, he speaks of mumbling the responses whispered to him and "vouching for things of which I knew nothing", but some scholars theorized that Adler (who was not English, but American) was married in a church (possibly Catholic) unfamiliar to Holmes, who was probably raised in the more traditional Anglican church.

There's this line Holmes has in the Granada episode of The Cardboard Box - it might have been one of the last episodes to air, and Holmes says something like "what is the purpose of this circle of misery and violence and fear - it must have a purpose or the universe has no meaning, and that is unthinkable."
It sort of has a spiritual or higher power overtone to it.