Ironwolf

I’ve been a fan of ex-preacher Dan Barker’s book Losing Faith in Faith for a long time now, and have distantly followed the activities of the state-church separation group Freedom from Religion Foundation of which he is co-President along with his 3rd-generation freethinker wife Annie Laurie Gaylor. Recently I discovered that they have been hosting the world’s only regular radio broadcast on the subject of freethought and state-church separation, Freethought Radio. Of course, what makes this work for me is that they also have a podcast, which I’ve been listening to for several weeks, and strongly recommend.

Last weekend they interviewed William Lobdell, who was religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times for eight years, and who by increments lost his faith as he did his best to objectively report on the shamelessness and corruption of God’s representatives. In his thoughtful piece that ran on Page 1 of the L.A. Times under the headline, I Got the Story but Lost My Faith, Lobdell summarizes his career writing about all facets of religion, including many positive stories. Eventually however, the darker aspects of religion began to overwhelm him, including unloving Mormons, pedophile priests, evangelicals becoming ostentatiously wealthy on the backs of the poor, and his struggle to make a difference through his writing.

I sought solace in another belief: that a church’s heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God’s house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.

Though all of this, Lobdell keeps looking for— and failing to find— the hand of God in human affairs.

I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But in a way, that was the point. I didn’t see these institutions drenched in God’s spirit. Shouldn’t religious organizations, if they were God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government, corporations and other groups in society?

Lobdell found it increasingly difficult to keep thinking and keep believing.

The questions that I thought I had come to peace with started to bubble up again. 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?

Until finally Lobdell concluded, many years after starting his journey on the L.A. Times religion beat, that his path had led him to, as he called it in his Freethought Radio interview, a “reluctant atheism.”

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.