Question One

For those just tuning in, I'm spending a few days away from the regular religion news roundup. Instead, my goal is to "come clean" to my sea of readers about my personal faith. It's something I always wish I had at hand when I'm reading religion coverage.

As I've said, I'm framing the entries in terms of questions I return to, inspired by a Quaker tradition of "queries" - spiritual questions worth pondering, which rarely have permanent answers.

Ready for Question One? Fundamental, but fruitful.

Why aren't you an atheist?

There are many, many atheists in my world. A love of my life was one of the first card-carrying "brights" (click here if you missed the euphemism moment of the "brights" and the "supers"). My brother is a personal hero, and a brilliant research chemist - last I heard he and his colleagues worship at the altar of the flying spaghetti monster. And the whole journalism world is rife. When I was covering the Billy Graham crusade in 2005, an author who was also sitting in the press box leaned over to me and said, "Doesn't it feel like you're sitting in the atheist's section of the church?"

I mean, my hometown paper used to be the Jyllands Post, home of atheist Flemming Rose and the Mohammed cartoon fiasco. It's not like the road to atheism hasn't been an option.

Not to imply that all atheists are dear to my heart. The pundits making the news rounds and the stories that quote them are making THAT one a little hard. Now, I respect Dawkins, Dennett or Harris - these guys are continuing dialogue with an antique history. But I don't think I can listen to another interview where one of them is quoted in vaguely condescending soundbytes, which seem always to bring out the worst in whomever they're talking to. If you caught the tete-a-tete between Sam Harris and Rick Warren in Newsweek, you know what I mean:

INTERVIEWER: Sam, is Rick intellectually dishonest?

HARRIS: I wouldn't put it in such an invidious way, but—

INTERVIEWER: Let's say Rick's not here and we're just hanging out in his office.

HARRIS: It is intellectually dishonest, frankly, to say that you are sure that Jesus was born of a virgin.

WARREN: I say I accept that by faith. And I think it's intellectually dishonest for you to say you have proof that it didn't happen. Here's the difference between you and me. I am open to the possibility that I am wrong in certain areas, and you are not.

For, what... 10 pages?

Soon to join the circuit: Christopher Hitchens and "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" to look forward to next month (the answer to: what is your follow-up act to bashing Mother Theresa, posthoumously, at the Vatican?). I can't wait.

There was (finally) a more even-handed treatment of atheism in the AP (courtesy of RNB). A great story, though the focus is primarily on Europe. They give mercifully meager ink to Dawkins and Harris, and instead talk about "Christian" atheists and "Muslim" atheists - and on the way, reference Karen Armstrong, Pope Benedict XVI, Thomas Hobbes and Socrates.

Both atheists and their foes agree on one thing: God — declared dead over a century ago by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche — is making a comeback, at least as a focus of controversy....

Secular Europeans voice dismay at American religiosity and worry that faith-based reasoning is spreading in Europe, too. Many Britons, for example, believe the Christian faith of Prime Minister Tony Blair helped lead him to entangle Britain in America’s war in Iraq.

There is also deep suspicion of Poland, a devoutly Catholic new member of the European Union. Its deputy education minister late last year urged the teaching of creationism, the Bible-inspired alternative to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

God has made a comeback even in secular Europe, and around the developed world, the battle lines are being drawn. Now more than ever, it's worth asking the question - which side?

Deeply, deeply personal, and hard to articulate. I can talk about how an atheist worldview seems flat to me: how art and music seem unhinged from their source; how virtue in a closed room seems pointless; levels of interaction with the world around me go missing. Yet I'm sure there is a kinder, gentler atheism, one full of aesthetic and imagination.

The turning point for me, critically, is that life loses a central narrative. As a writer and as a person, that idea of the Greater Story is something I can't live without. And there's something even more fundamental in my rejection of atheism. And for that, I'm going to quote a VERY out of date source.

One of my favorite olde-tyme scholars, Gilbert Murray, was a writer and a scholar of ancient Greek. When writing about religion, he had to wrestle to find a definition of the subject that could encompass 1,000 years of the most varied spiritual practice in history: fertility cults to the aesthetic flights of Homer; Delphi to the rationalist schools of Epicurus and Diogenes. If these are all religion, he asked, what in the world IS religion?

His answer thrills me. In his sober don's voice, he writes, "Religion, like poetry and most other living things, cannot be defined..." but promptly plunks down his definition. "Religion essentially deals with the uncharted region of human experience." It is, he says, how we know what we don't know. This is true for him of all the world's religions, from Christianity to cargo cults.

"It is obvious that most, if analyzed into intellectual beliefs, are false... Yet the fact remains that man must have some relation towards the uncharted, the mysterious tracts of life which surround him on every side. And for my own part I am content to say that his method must be to a large extent very much what St. Paul calls pistis, or faith: that is, some attitde not of the conscious intellect but of the whole being, using all of its powers of sensitiveness, all its feeblest and most inarticulate feelers and tentacles in an effort to somehow touch with these what cannot be grasped by the definite senses or be analyzed by the conscious reason. What we gain this is an insecure but a precious posession. We gain no dogma, at least no safe dogma, but we gain much more. We gain something hard to define, which lies at the heart not only of religion, but of art and poetry and all the higher strivings of human emotion."

That's an answer I can sign on to. A search for a more complete truth is important to me, a search that reaches out not only with the tools of science and intellect but also of faith. And that is why I'm not an atheist.

Tune in tomorrow.

UPDATE: I just found THIS posted on the blog of Ruth Gledhill, the religion correspondent for the Times. Same idea, same day, more elegantly written. Somehow I don't mind getting scooped. She devotes some elegant ink to stating why she is a believer. Stated simply, it is "fundamentally about turning to life." Give it a read.