Perhaps I’d gotten too cynical, but I didn’t see this good turn of events coming. As announced yesterday, religious leaders in Cranston, Rhode Island stepped up to defend Jessica and speak out against the hateful comments, the bullying, and the threats.

Here were the rapid reactions I jotted down as I watched:

• Yes, like you, I cringed every time the news anchors opened their mouths to talk about the case. I would have loved it if they actually stated facts as facts: The banner was unconstitutional. We can cite the judge’s authority. Some threats were death threats. They were made publicly. There’s no reason to make them sound like allegations, they’re facts viewers should know.
• I’m a bit confused about what the clergy was trying to say by comparing Jessica as a prophet.
• I’m ever so glad that someone is condemning the death threats because they still hope Jessica will come to faith. (Yes, that was my sarcastic face.)
• When Jessica used the phrase “I already won the lawsuit — and fairly so,” I couldn’t help but start grinning. I’m not sure why, but the way she slipped it in was perfect. For some reason, that was left out of the WPRI transcript online.
• I also loved the way Rev. Gene Dyszlewski called out the “radio demagoguery.” Damn straight. It WAS toxic and harmful.
• It would have been nice to hear a defense of the separation of church and state, though the press release mentions that they “speak in support of Jessica Ahlquist’s right to challenge the banner at Cranston High School West.” Perhaps that didn’t make it into the two minutes of air time.

Overall, I’m really glad to see this press conference happen. True, the bar wasn’t set very high. It would be a sad day indeed if religious moderates wouldn’t come out in favor of the Constitution and against death threats to 16-year-old girls.

Jessica’s case has been deeply polarizing in her community — but at least we’re finding out which “pole” the religious moderates are closer to. It brought together 18 leaders: Baptists and UU’s, Jews and Muslims, all coming together to defend an atheist from violence. We atheists often say that we need the religious moderates to be on our side, condemning the extremists. This is a start.

… The Rhode Island State Council of Churches will hold a news conference in support of Jessica Ahlquist, the 16-year-old atheist who challenged the Cranston prayer banner, on Tuesday at 2:30 p.m.

The news conference “in favor of tolerance and civility” will include faith leaders in Cranston and throughout Rhode Island speaking out to support Ahlquist’s right to challenge the prayer banner.

The press conference will also condemn the treatment and inappropriate language and words use to describe Ahlquist.

We usually don’t see many moderate Christians speaking up when it comes to issues like church/state separation, so this is a very welcome gesture.

The event will take place at the Edgewood Congregational Church in Cranston tomorrow.

Feel free to show some love on the group’s Facebook page.

Or, you know, send them some flowers from Glimpse of Gaia.

(Via Steel City Skeptics)

What do you do if you led a church and you thought those ads sent an awful message? (What? Atheists think they’re good without god? Never!)

Well, the absolutely worst thing you could do is try to “fight back.”

If you put up your own billboard in response, or complain about the atheists’ message to the media, you’re playing right into our hands. We get more media attention, we get more chances to get out message across, we get to keep the conversation going, we get more eyeballs/donors/members. If Christians respond, it’s a win for us.

In Ohio, where the Freedom From Religion Foundation recently put up a number of ads as part of their “Out of the Closet” campaign, one church is responding in a way that makes you wonder: What the hell were they thinking?

Seriously. That’s what it says.

Bravo, McElroy Road Church of Christ. I know what you were getting at, but you inadvertently did our work for us. (Thanks for the free ad!)

Not only are they telling us that god doesn’t exist (in a large font, no less), they’re also telling us to be skeptical of what we hear! I couldn’t have said it better myself

In fact, the Mid Ohio Atheists group — a group that has nothing to do with this billboard — is getting credit for it:

Members of Mid Ohio Atheists have had people contact them and congratulate them on putting up our first billboard.

While we certainly do agree with the sentiment expressed on the billboard- that there is no god, and that people should not believe everything they hear, we want to clarify that this is not our billboard. It was not paid for by us in part or in the whole. Nether were we involved in the design of the billboard.

I don’t know who the church paid to design the ad, but my hunch is that it’s the same person who designs all those funny-and-they-even-know-why church message boards:

(Thanks to Edward for the link!)

Beats the heck out of praying.

… remembrance, while crucial, is not enough. We must also look to the future. Whether it is frequent discrimination against the American Muslim community, or thousands of recent threatening anti-atheist comments on the Fox News Facebook page, the voices of religious and political division are loud and clear. But what about the voices of inclusion?

…

In conjunction with a diverse group of Harvard faculty, staff, and student groups, as well as local congregations and organizations, HCH is organizing an interfaith community service event to package 9,110 nutritious meals to be distributed to food-insecure children in the Boston area.

If you’re interested, there are two ways you can help:

1) If you live in the Boston area, you can volunteer to package the meals in person.

2) Wherever you live, if you’d like to help cover the costs ($0.25 a meal… which comes out to a little under $2,500), you can make a donation here:

(Any extra money raised will go toward another interfaith hunger event in November.)

Let’s reach that goal quickly. It’ll make a statement about how “hands that help are better than lips that pray.”

The Secular Student Alliance affiliate at the University of Northern Iowa decided to do some volunteering early. In response to their campus’ “second annual 24/7 Prayer Week” (a Christian effort to encourage “seven days of continuous prayer”), the atheist group scheduled a variety of volunteering opportunities.

They called it the “24/7 Service Week.”

“If people want to pray, that’s their prerogative, but we wanted people to have an opportunity to give back to the community in a real way,” said [senior Cory] Derringer, a sociology major and president of UNI Freethinkers and Inquirers.

Service Week volunteers helped sort or bag donations at the Northeast Iowa Food Bank and planted trees and spread mulch on trails at the Hartman Reserve Nature Center. They also played bingo with residents at NewAldaya Lifescapes, formerly the Cedar Falls Lutheran Home, and picked up cigarette butts.

“It’s fun work and you can see the benefit as you do it,” Derringer said.

…

UNI Freethinkers and Inquirers invited both non-religious and religious students to take part in 24/7 Service Week. About 20 students showed up for service projects, Derringer said, and to his knowledge, maybe one or two openly identified themselves as religious.

What a fantastic project. This is the type of interfaith cooperation I can get behind It’s not about promoting superstitious nonsense. It’s about getting work done, and I’m proud of the atheist group for taking a lead on this.

On their website, UNIFI member MIchael Dippold offered his thoughts on why Service Week was so important:

Organizers of Prayer Week have claimed that “God has done amazing things this week, as we humbly expected him to!” Unfortunately, I don’t see it. No mountains moved. No diseases magically disappeared. People are still ravaged by the plagues of war, famine, and poverty. This is why prayer is ridiculous, and why it’s so important to compare it to ways of helping the plight of the human race that actually do work. It has been said that two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer, I absolutely believe this to be true.

Over the next week or two, you’ll hear Christians talk about how prayer is important but they must go hand-in-hand with deeds.

Which makes no sense when you think about it. And churches do it all the time.

They want a new building, so they pray for it… but they also ask for donations.

They might pray to get better if they’re sick… but they’re also going to see the doctor.

If the latter works, you don’t need the former. There’s no redeeming quality to prayer. It accomplishes nothing except making the Christians feel better about themselves.

0 + 1 still equals 1.

The atheists are just making that equation more efficient.

It’s the political thing to do. It’s the humanitarian thing to do. It’s the clever Machiavellian thing to do. And concerns about the label “interfaith” can actually be used to our advantage.

I won’t defend all interfaith, but I do encourage fellow atheists not to dismiss opportunities for the wrong reasons. There’s too much broad generalization and vague hand-waving about definitions. When should we engage and how?

In a nutshell: It’s worth engaging when we’re working toward a shared secular goal, when there’s a chance of gaining social capital through positive interaction, and when we’re not buying our place at the table with silence or dishonesty. How should we engage? Skillfully, loudly, proudly, and with a big ol’ smile on our faces.
(For the tl;dr conclusion, click here to go to the end.)

Don’t reject all Interfaith ‘By Definition’

A first stumbling block: I recommended not participating at the cost of dishonesty. Is it dishonest for an atheist, just by definition, to participate in interfaith? PZ dismissed the President’s Challenge, saying “‘interfaith’ is a code word for the religious clubhouse. It’s used to exclude secularism and promote a unity of faith, any faith, where it doesn’t matter what BS you believe, as long as you really, really believe.”

It’s a common view. My friend Jen, who writes Blag Hag, criticized anything called interfaith yesterday, starting a post with:

That’s partially why I think the push for atheist inclusion in interfaith panels and organizations is so silly. Atheism is not a faith. In fact, it’s the complete absence of faith. Therefore, it is not interfaith. Case closed. If that simple dictionary definition wasn’t enough…

Words can be used in a strict or loose way, they can apply to different concepts in different contexts, and have literal and implied connotations. You know who understands that? Some guy wrote an awesome post a couple months ago mocking “dictionary atheists” for insisting on a strict definition of the word. It was on a blog with a strange name, I think it was Pharyngula or something:

Dictionary Atheists. Boy, I really do hate these guys. You’ve got a discussion going, talking about why you’re an atheist, or what atheism should mean to the community, or some such topic that is dealing with our ideas and society, and some smug wanker comes along and announces that “Atheism means you lack a belief in gods. Nothing more. Quit trying to add meaning to the term.” As if atheism can only be some platonic ideal floating in virtual space with no connections to anything else…

You tell yourself, PZ! We should be wary if someone’s argument starts with “By definition, atheism is -.” or “By definition, interfaith is -.” The word ‘interfaith’ isn’t a platonic ideal that always, in every case, excludes us. Sure, it very often does – after all, the dictionary definitions exist for a reason! But we have to know how a person is using the word before we know whether it applies; quoting the strict dictionary definition isn’t appropriate in every context. If we could cut through the semantics and just look at the project’s details, what do we think?

From all evidence, the White House has demonstrated – through public statements and actions – that we atheists, humanists, and secular students are included. The project is an effort to unite people of all religious backgrounds toward common secular goals. In short, a project doing work I support.

Connotations Matter – Apply Jujitsu!

Yes, semantics DO matter. I couldn’t do my job without paying attention to semantics. We can’t completely scrub words of their connotations – using the word ‘faith’ to refer to a worldview can be problematic if people still have the association ‘belief without evidence’.

Interfaith leaders are aware of this – they’ve voiced similar frustrations. Think about all the arguments we have over whether to call ourselves atheist, agnostic, skeptic, humanist, secular humanist, bright, pastafarian, freethinker, theological noncognitivist, nontheist… How do you feel about a self-professed humanist who refuses to go to an “atheist” meetup or conference because they don’t want to be associated with “atheism”?

Is it a problem for atheists to be involved in a project whose name includes the word interfaith? I’m going to go against the grain and say not only is it not a problem – we can use it to our advantage. To the extent that the word ‘interfaith service’ has the connotation ‘religious people doing charity’ we can do some Memetic Jujitsu!

Just look at what President Obama said in announcing the project:

I know that as we go forward it’s going to take all of us – Christian and Jew, Hindu and Muslim, believer and non-believer – to meet the challenges of the 21st century. As a Christian who became committed to the church while serving my community, I know that an act of service can unite people of all faiths – or even no faith – around a common purpose of helping those in need. In doing so, we can not only better our communities, we can build bridges of understanding between ourselves and our neighbors.

See how he was forced to emphasize that we were involved? I can’t tell you how much I love political and social leaders telling the world that religion isn’t the only way to be a good person. Our participation makes them highlight that we are being good without god.

Are you really worried about people thinking atheism is a religion when the President is repeatedly referring to “people of all religions and none”? That people will think atheists have faith when they hear “people of all faiths and none”?

The best way to get people using those phrases? Get involved and pivot the collective vocabulary. Sit at the table with religious leaders and smile, so they’re confronted with their (usually inadvertent) exclusionary language. Sharon Moss, the President of our Humanist Community, has shared inspiring success stories like this. Not only have people started being more inclusive, she doesn’t even have to be the one to raise objections. As the other participants became more aware of humanist participation, some of them started arguing HER side. She could sit there while others had her back. That’s progress we wouldn’t see without specifically engaging with religious groups.

What Interfaith Has over “Just Community Service”

The objection to the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Challenge I consider strongest is: Why organize service around faith traditions at all? Why “Interfaith and Community Service” and not just “Community Service”? By specifically reaching out to religious groups – and highlighting their involvement in the project’s title – it strengthens the impression that religion is the source of charity.

The point is well taken. But while interfaith programs are this way, I don’t see much benefit from our refusing to participate. At least by getting involved, we can use our Jujitsu to help mitigate the effect.

And we do benefit by making an effort to reach out to faith traditions. The idea isn’t simply to do community service, it’s to bringing together different groups (often with strained relations) to work toward a shared goal. The psychological impact can be powerful (see the Robber’s Cave experiment). When people work together for something they both want, it reduces animosity.

Why should we care? For one thing, political progress will be easier if we’re not despised. But also: With less animosity, it’s easier to win on the merit of our arguments. The more I learn about psychology, the less I can believe that we humans rationally weigh arguments to evaluate which side has better evidence. Chris Mooney just wrote an excellent article for Mother Jones titled “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science“:

We’re not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn’t take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that’s highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

We have better arguments than religion. I truly believe that. But getting people to listen to those arguments through the irrational stigma can be tough. We’re all influenced by a emotional factors, including how much we like the person making a particular argument. Ask yourself: are you more likely to consider evidence from someone you like and trust, or someone you don’t?

In each situation we have to weigh what we’re giving up to gain that social capital, and whether it’s worth it. If we gain social capital while doing something we wanted anyway – like community service – it’s a win-win.

The Wrong Kind of Interfaith

There’s a time to offend people. It can be a powerful tool. We can’t pursue social capital at all costs and be “nice” no matter what.

For example, it might make the religious right more comfortable to tell them science and religion are perfectly compatible. But lying is not a price I’m willing to pay. I won’t pretend to believe something I don’t or make a show of respecting something that I don’t.

If your interfaith program makes funding/membership rely on an agreement that you can’t voice “offensive” opinions on your own time? Well, remember how I said I wouldn’t defend all interfaith? Yeah, get the fuck out of there. That’s the wrong kind of interfaith. Our right to criticize religion is far too valuable. Jen (fairly) complains about the double-standard:

[R]ight now, the “accepting” interfaith movement is full of hypocrisy. It’s totally fine for religious people in the interfaith movement to disagree about things – that’s the whole concept of interfaith work. But an atheist disagrees with them? Then they’re just being an asshole and need to shut up. We saw this sort of reaction with Everybody Draw Mohammed Day – when the atheists stood by their values, they were the ones in the wrong. They were the ones who needed to shut up lest they offend the others in the group.

It really IS an annoying double standard. But if the only consequence is being told we’re in the wrong, that’s an indictment of society’s double standard – not of engagement with interfaith. People might get offended by smiling chalked stick figured labeled Muhammad, and they have the right to be Very Upset about it and tell us so. But that’ll be the case whether or not we’re working to rebuild houses with them or sitting in a circle to talk once a month. We don’t have to change your approach outside to get benefits from interfaith:

If anything, increased interaction with the interfaith crowd will cut down on the confusion and double standards. Since the Interfaith Youth Core controversy around Draw Muhammad Day, we’ve built much better relations. I think both sides have a better understanding now – achieved by each of us doing what we thought was right and discussing it.

If you want to be a diplomat and build bridges, this is an opportunity to live and demonstrate your humanist values.

If you want to be a firebrand and change minds, this is an opportunity to build up some social capital to help your argument go down easier.

If you want to speed up our political progress, this is an opportunity to gain influence.

If you want to change society’s association of morality with religion, this is an opportunity to change the dialogue.

Unless we’re required to give up our honesty and sign away our right to speak our minds (a legitimate concern), the benefits seem to outweigh the costs.

So what if the title has ‘faith’ in it? It forces people to highlight that we’re good without god. So what if society has a double standard? We change that by speaking our mind AND engaging to help others understand us. So what if we get yelled at? We’re strong enough. We know other people don’t agree with us. We know some of them think we’re going to hell. We know other people believe and do things we find repulsive. None of that is a reason to avoid interfaith engagement, especially in projects that focus on secular missions like the President’s Challenge.

I hope to see secular students getting – carefully and skillfully – involved.

David had “rejected the evangelical Christianity of his family” but was now coming home to see them again, ready to fight back against their religious arguments, expecting to win that battle easily.

After a conversation with his father, though, he ended up coming down a notch or two.

There’s one passage worth noting even though it speaks favorably about religion. After David reflects upon his dad’s Christianity (in the face of all its logical problems), he tries to see faith from his dad’s perspective:

The thing about the Bible is it’s huge. I could poke at it because I could pick at anything I wanted. You know, talking snakes, Virgin Birth, but eventually I came around to thinking, “Well, maybe religion doesn’t have to be consistent. Maybe you can just like it enough for it to be good.”

You know, maybe religion can be something more like, like, I’m a big Star Trek fan, and if you ask me, I would say, like, “I love Star Trek.” But if you ask me to defend individual episodes, I would be at a loss, because I can’t go to bat for everything that Star Trek did. I just love the concept…

And maybe religion could be like that.

Glamorized fiction mixed with memorable stories?

Ever wonder what characters on Star Trek thought about God?

Let’s hear the Klingon perspective:

The gods were “more trouble than they were worth”

Well put!

(Thanks to Danish Atheist for the link!)

His new blog is called Atheologically Thinking.

…

As an avid reader of Pharyngula, Butterflies & Wheels, and, of course, Friendly Atheist, I was surprised to see how much negative attention the idea of Interfaith Service generated last week. I’ve heard a lot of interesting reasons why Interfaith Service poses challenges to secular folks, but I wanted to share what I think are the overwhelming benefits of Interfaith Service. But instead of answering the relatively easy question of why Humanists ought to engage in interfaith service, I want to answer a more interesting question: Why should New Atheists engage in Interfaith Service?

1. It accomplishes service. Who cares if we have to hijack someone’s religious delusions to compel them to help us build a park or feed the homeless? The point is, we get a park built and the homeless fed.
2. Doing Interfaith Service lets people know about Atheism. A lot of people who might consider themselves Atheists don’t even know that we exist. This helps raise our profile. Furthermore, your group of New Atheists might even get media attention for their participation. Imagine how being featured on the local news, or in an article in the local paper might help you spread the word about your local group of heathens.
3. It robs religious groups of yet another day to publicly proclaim that only faith can compel people to acts of public service. Now that they have to mention that we ”dirty Atheists” helped them build a park, maybe we can have a little less pretentious public piety.
4. It helps disprove the (untrue) and offensive assertion that atheists are immoral. Religious believers can hardly accuse non-believers of immorality when they are side by side, building low-income housing, or taking a shift at a soup kitchen with them.
5. It gives us an opportunity to talk to believers about their faith and show them that they don’t have to believe in an invisible man in the sky to live ethical lives. How are people going to learn that you can be good without god and leave a happy and ethical life as a non-believer, if we happy and ethical non-believers cloister ourselves in our ivory tower of Atheism?

One final consideration: If you want people to stop calling it “Interfaith Service,” because you find that term offensive (because we don’t have faith in an eternal sky father), join an Interfaith Service project and make your impassioned protest that you feel like the name of the event excludes you by definition from within their own community.

If your Interfaith group isn’t respectful of your criticism and doesn’t make some effort to include you (perhaps, by saying ”Interfaith and Inter-Philosophy Service,” or ”Inter-World-View Service”), you can complain loudly and publicly that your so-called ”Interfaith Service Group” isn’t standing up for all participants, faithful and faithless. You can even threaten to back out of the group (call a press conference, write an op-ed) and eloquently call attention to their hypocrisy. If the Interfaith movement really does want to include Atheists and respect our perspective, they have to put their money where their mouth is and respect criticism from Atheists just as they would respect any other group’s criticism (for example, not meeting on Jewish holidays, on Christmas, or during Ramadan). In essence, you can use their invitation to Interfaith Service to open a dialogue about how you feel like “faith” is given undue credit, and to show them how communities of faith victimizes Atheists by excluding them from the faith conversation by its very title.

In short, the “New Atheists” stand to gain a lot more than they would lose by participating in Interfaith Service. At best, they can use Interfaith Service to educate people about Atheism. At worst, they can serve as the reasonable adults in the room and expose the areas where the Interfaith Service movement might improve (including that very term…).

…

I love to read and I particularly like to read things that are of interest to important people in my life. So when my husband came out to me as an atheist in late 2009, I went looking for something to read so I could better understand his views. And the first book that I read wasn’t Dawkins or Hitchens or Harris, but rather Hemant’s.

As a Christian, most of what I knew about atheists came from Christian sources, which, unfortunately, are not always as accurate as they should be. Having an opportunity to hear about an atheist’s perception of Christians — straight from the source — was beneficial to me in comparing to my husband’s impressions. And what I’ve found in the past year and a half is that getting to know some atheists has made me more like the Christian that I want to be.

What has changed?

1. I speak out against injustice. I admit I had no idea that atheists were discriminated against until I had one in my family. Injustice that affects me directly makes me angry and I hope that I turn that anger into action. This doesn’t simply apply to atheists, but to all of those marginalized by society and especially by the church. Hemant frequently calls out people of faith to be a voice for those who are being hurt by the church and I believe his message has caused me to practice the kind of faith that I believe Jesus asked his followers to have.
2. I actually practice unconditional love. I’m going to disagree with Penn Jillette and say that I don’t find proselytizing to be a display of love. While being a Christian is certainly not something that I feel like I need to hide, I also believe that the greatest commandment is to love others. Whether they choose to believe like me or not, my first goal is to love. Despite having different beliefs, I feel like I’ve developed a friendship with Hemant over the past year and that acceptance has caused me to be more accepting of others who are not just like me.
3. I’m not afraid to question things. One of the things that I admired about Hemant’s book was his willingness to put his own non-belief on the line and participate in an honest look at the way different Christians practice their faith. While Christian history has always had people who have questioned long-held beliefs, it is not something that one sees modeled often in evangelical circles. While my questions have not led me completely away from faith, there have been changes in my faith over the past year that are a direct result of a willingness to reexamine long-held beliefs.
4. I realized it’s okay to laugh at myself. Every time Hemant posts a picture of a baby he’s prepared to eat, it reminds me not to take myself too seriously. If someone says something negative about me or my beliefs, I can either get worked up and angry about it, or I can laugh. I always want to work toward better understanding others and presenting myself in a way that can be understood, but I also don’t want to get hung up on worrying about people who have no intention of looking for common ground.

There are no doubt places where Hemant and I will continue to disagree. But there are a lot more places where we agree. Things like respecting the dignity of others, caring for the world we live in, wanting the best for the people we love –- these are values that we share. And I fully intend to continue drawing on the inspiration of a friendly atheist to be a better Christian.

Have you had any unlikely relationships positively shape your life?

Do you think it’s possible to benefit from a relationship with people of different faith backgrounds or beliefs than your own?

Hi Richard,

I am a Small Groups Pastor at a Christian Church in a mid-sized city in the Midwest. I wanted to say I really appreciate the tone of your website, it is quite refreshing. Our church is doing a series on why you believe what you believe, and I was wondering if you could provide me with the most challenging questions for Christians about their faith. I feel that too often Christians have taken the stance of isolation and even get angry when we are confronted by those who do not believe what we believe. Honestly, I believe God wants all of us to ask these questions and seek the answers. I believe that for Christians and atheists alike, the problem is that when we become comfortable with our stance, we stop asking questions and seeking answers. Any question or questions that you could provide will be quite helpful.

Thanks,
Wayne

Dear Wayne,

Thank you for your gracious attitude. I admire your courage to both present such questions to yourself and your congregants, as well as to come to a group of atheists to ask for those questions. I agree with you that we should all avoid intellectual complacency, and should practice constant genuine self-questioning. The anger that believers and non-believers often hold for each other I think is rooted in fear and hurt. So we should also keep questioning our assumptions and prejudices about each other.

Many of the readers on this blog are very astute in these matters. Some were formerly devout Christians, and they might offer questions that challenged them. So I will leave it to them to provide the challenging questions. I also refer you to a post published on this site a few years ago where you might find some interesting questions.

My questions to you will be about how deeply will you and your group apply those challenging questions to your faith and to your religion.

No question can be framed that can shake or destroy someone’s religious faith if they are not willing to let that question fully into their minds and to consider it sincerely, earnestly, and honestly. Many times I have seen Christians entertain questions that were supposed to challenge them, but it became apparent that it was a charade, a pointless game because they only responded with platitudes, clichés, copied-and-pasted scripture, pre-packaged talking points from Christian websites, or fallacious arguments that were debunked centuries ago. These responses would not satisfy a fifth-grader who was willing to be intellectually honest. They only sound good to someone who isn’t really thinking deeply about it. A series of five posts on this blog in which Lee Strobel responded to our questions was a disappointing example.

Sadly, many people are so ardent in their pursuit of what they call “Divine Truth” that they have lost touch with simple honesty. They approach “challenging questions” with a pre-decided answer, and succeed in avoiding anything implied by those questions that undermine that answer. They come away thinking that the best challenge that atheists could throw at them bounced off their faith, when actually it merely bounced off their well-defended minds. If the exercise was supposed to strengthen their faith, it did not. It only strengthened their assumption that their faith is strong; it only strengthened their faith in their faith.

To be clear, I’m not saying that people of faith must have skirted or glossed over such a question if they emerge with their faith still in tact. Of course it could be possible that they have carefully and honestly pondered it; I’ve just never witnessed that. I’m saying that letting the questions really soak deeply into your mind is by far the bigger challenge than the questions themselves.

So here are my questions about handling such questions:

When considering questions about your religion, do you have lower standards for evidence and sound argument than the standards you use when buying a used car, or sitting on a jury, or considering a religion different from yours? If such standards don’t apply to questions about your religion, why not?

Are you completely unconditional about the answers to which these questions may lead you, or are certain answers off-limits, and you’ll abort the questioning if that is where it seems to be leading?

Are you willing to be never fully satisfied with any answers, never rest on the laurels of an answer that soothes your doubt, but might still be false?

The worst atrocities in history have been committed by people who rendered themselves incapable of doubt. Absolute certainty was their addiction, and “absolute truth” was their drug. Can you see that doubt is not an enemy, and become comfortable with it as a good and constant friend who keeps you honest, humble and human?

Wayne, I wish you well in your effort to help your group become more thoughtful, mindful, truthful and yes, doubtful in not just the practice of their faith, but also their daily lives.

Now to our readers: I thank you beforehand for your help. Please offer your challenging questions in the spirit of respectful treatment, just as you would want questions to be asked of you by Christians.

Richard

A clarification: the link directly below in the little white box is for sending Richard questions for advice. To offer your challenging questions to Wayne, click on the post’s title or the word “comments,” and go to the bottom of the post’s separate page, where you’ll find a box for submitting comments. Thank you for your very insightful questions!

You may send your questions for Richard to . Please keep your letters concise. They may be edited. There is a very large number of letters. I am sorry if I am unable to respond in a timely manner.