Guest Post by Morbo
I’ve taken a lot of shots at fundamentalists on this blog. I don’t mean to offend all people of faith, and if I’ve done so I apologize. In many ways, I admire people whose religion motivates them to help others and work for social justice. (Right-wing fundamentalists whose faith only motivates them to hate others are another story.)
We’ve all made spiritual journeys of one type or another. In my view, religion is too big of a question to be ignored. Even if the end result is a loss of faith, the issue must be grappled with. To do otherwise is to live an unexamined life.
Individuals who engage faith on an intellectual level often emerge with powerful stories to tell. One of them in William Lobdell, a Los Angeles Times reporter who recently wrote about his own spiritual journey, one he undertook even as he was writing about religion for the paper.
Lobdell’s professional work and personal journey intersected in surprising ways. He writes about this with raw honesty, and at the end, as his faith starts to change, he’s not afraid to call a pastor he knows and pose some tough questions.
“The questions that I thought I had come to peace with started to bubble up again,” Lobdell writes. “Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones? Why do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when he’s never been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal chord?”
“In one e-mail, I asked John, who had lost a daughter to cancer, why an atheist businessman prospers and the child of devout Christian parents dies. Why would a loving God make this impossible for us to understand?”
Read the piece to see how the pastor responded to Lobdell — and more importantly, how Lobdell responded to the reply.
In a country where it’s often taken as a given that belief in God is necessary for good behavior and good citizenship, where it’s assumed that of course a higher power created the universe and all the things in it, where in some parts of the county one risks ostracism by expressing doubt, Lobdell reminds us that the questions skeptics ask are anything but unreasonable — indeed they are uncertainties that nag at every intellectually serious person, even those whose faith remains intact.
Lobdell’s piece is long but well worth your time. Read it and be enriched.