From The Christian Century-
Either you don't believe in God or you're a dope." This is how Newsweek's Lisa Miller sums up the thinking of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. And despite the fact that 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God, Miller writes, plenty of us seem to enjoy the new atheists' "books and telegenic bombast so much that we don't mind their low opinion of us."
Former religion reporter William Lobdell's deconversion narrative, Losing My Religion, refrains from both bombast and suggestions of dopiness. By his very choice of genre—memoir rather than apologia—Lobdell enters a different territory of the new atheism, one already inhabited by several other counter conversion narrators, including John Loftus, who wrote Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity (Prometheus, 2008), and Dan Barker, author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists (Ulysses, 2008). Lobdell is careful to distinguish himself from Hitchens and his truculent allies: "Their disbelief has a religious quality to it that I'm not ready to take on," he writes. He calls himself a "reluctant atheist" and a "skeptical deist." "With all that has happened to me," Lobdell says, "I don't feel qualified to judge anyone else."
"All that has happened" includes, most notably, Lobdell's eight-year tenure on the religion beat of the Los Angeles Times during the breaking of the Cath olic clergy sex abuse scandal. Lob dell had begun religion reporting as a newly minted evangelical after a nominally Episcopal childhood and agnostic young adulthood. After accepting Christ at a men's retreat and beginning to attend a megachurch, Lobdell prayed for a religion-writing job. When he convinced editors at the L.A. Times to let him write a religion column, and when he subsequently was added to the religion beat, Lobdell attributed both achievements to the hand of God. "I needed only to produce solid journalism about faith in America, and I would be fulfilling God's call and my career ambitions," he writes.
More here-
http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=7793
1 comment:
Some people leave religion to become atheists. Atheism is irrational – see link in the left menu in the below blog that proves the existence of a Creator. But when people that say they represent the Creator do bad things, then humans conclude that there cannot be a Creator.
Undoubtedly many people have religious experiences. An important question is if all religious (if any religions) experiences also indicate a communication with the Creator of the universe. Many devotees of all religions would answer that the religious experiences that the followers of the other religions have only are brain constructions, and that they are not indicators of a communication with the Creator. Or could it be that the followers of all religions originates from the Creator; which would imply that the contradictions and conflicts among all religions reflect an intrinsic and internal cognitive dissonance and dysfunction within a self-contradicting Creator? We will go through some basic formal logical argumentation about the Creator to be able to answer that quest.
Read more here: http://bloganders.blogspot.com/2009/08/proof-for-creator-and-that-torah-is.html
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