Here's an example of non-batshit religious belief - an example of the kind of individual that gave me trouble, as a pretty committed - even "hardcore" - atheist....
Man I hate irrational belief and religious belief is irrational therefore everyone who is religious is irrational and crazy - but wait...
How do I square that with my grandfather, respected head of department of English at a major canadian university - and super smart - yet fairly devout (and privately devout - never pushed anything on us) - how was a super smart, super nice person like that religious?
While I hated the way religion could poison political discourse, especially on stuff like gay marriage - what about guys like Chris Hedges - where religion pushed him to do all kinds of good work in the world and actually pushed him to "my side" of important social issues?
This was a fascinating piece to read as a non-believer, a signpost on a journey of mine that has seen me soften in my attitudes to believers and religious belief in general (a two sided journey: greater appreciation of religious-believing individuals/greater appreciation that irrational belief is universal infects the areligious just as much as the religious):
Chris Hedges: Ordained to Write - Chris Hedges - Truthdig
Thirty years ago I stood in a church in Albany, N.Y., with my father, a Presbyterian minister. I had graduated from Harvard Divinity School and had purchased a one-way ticket to El Salvador, where the military government, backed by the United States, was slaughtering between 700 and 1,000 people a month.
I had decided, as George Orwell and James Baldwin did earlier, to use my writing as a weapon. I would stand with the oppressed. I would give them a voice. I would describe their suffering and their hopes. And I would name the injustices being done to them. It was a decision that would send me to war for two decades, to experience the worst of human evil, to taste too much of my own fear and to confront the reality of violence and random death.
But going to El Salvador as a reporter was not something the Presbyterian Church at the time recognized as a valid ministry, and a committee rejected my “call.” I told my father, who was waiting outside the meeting room, that I was not to be ordained. It must have been hard for him to see his son come so close to ordination, only to have it slip away, and hard to know that his son was leaving for a conflict in which journalists had been killed and would be killed. What the church would not validate he did. “You,” he said, “are ordained to write.”
Whole thing was an excellent read and a bit of an eye opener - longtime reader of Hedges, didn't even realize he was so religious until I read this piece!
