A very thoughtful response.\u00a0 Thank you for sharing it.\u00a0 I was particularly impressed by how you say you handle people who innocently ask you to pray for this person or that.<\/p>\n
Without re-litigating the rest of the piece (I think there\u2019s little value in that) I will just point out that while you may have encountered few atheists who say they can disprove God\u2019s existence, they are not rare in my experience.\u00a0\u00a0In fact, Patricia, though she stakes a claim to a sort of non-judgmental, empirical neutrality, actually makers her argument in a condescending and dismissive tone that belies the claim.\u00a0 That\u2019s often been my experience.\u00a0 And yes, I have to say that people like that remind me of fundamentalists in that both give off the same smug sense of having all the answers.\u00a0 The piece I wrote was a defense of faith, but it was also intended, like Marilynne Robinson\u2019s book, as a defense of questions.<\/p>\n
Be well.<\/p>\n
Yours Truly,<\/p>\n
Leonard Pitts, Jr.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The response to Patricia, the atheist that wrote to him, received quite the negative response on the Miami secular humanists\u2019 Meetup board.\u00a0 Like me, they were surprised by her inappropriate reaction to Pitts\u2019 innocent remark that Lara Logan \u201cis deserving of our compassion, our empathy and our prayers.\u201d\u00a0 I guess I have just not met many non-theists like Patricia.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Confirming my suspicion that he is a true gentleman, Leonard Pitts actually responded to my critique of his column about atheists being like fundamentalists. A very thoughtful response.\u00a0 Thank you for sharing it.\u00a0 I was particularly impressed by how you say you handle people who innocently ask you to pray for this person or that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,25,30],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogentries","tag-atheism","tag-liberal-religions-and-theologies","tag-non-theism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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