Skeptical Faith

Google Image (This blog was originally published in 2014. I did some updating for 2018, but it's mostly the same. The sentiments, especially the hope that readers will have a thankful Thanksgiving, are also the same.) I was a columnist at one point in my newspaper career, and for several Thanksgivings, my whole column comprised a list of names of people to whom I was particularly thankful. I had thought about doing that with this blog, which will be posted on Thanksgiving Day, my favorite of all the holidays. But in the interest of privacy, which is becoming a rarer commodity, I decided against it. You know who you are. You’re family and friends and the readers of this blog, including the people to whom I send weekly e-mails about the posts, my Facebook friends and the unknown number who see it on Google+ and Tumblr. I am particularly grateful to Jim Stessman, my friend and former newspaper colleague, for looking these blogs over each week and providing valuable fee...

Google Image A recent article in America magazine dealt with the affinity between Pope Francis and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a biophysicist and author who died in 1972. The Pope and Heschel never met, but Heschel had a great influence on Rabbi Abraham Skorka, Francis’ good friend in his native Argentina. Back in 1976, Heschel wrote a book called “God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism.” Even 38 years ago, it seems, the handwriting was on the wall about future generations’ lack of enthusiasm for religion, and Heschel’s book still speaks volumes. “It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society,” he wrote. “It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. “When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of t...

Google Image A staple of this blog is that many people, believers and non-believers, struggle with faith. Like non-believers, many believers have doubts and questions. Some have spent lifetimes of struggle with questions about God. For various reasons, believers have come down on the side of faith. Many of us, like the psalmist says, simply “cling to him/her in love.” Today’s believers can’t bank on the artificial props of the past, however. They can’t depend on God as an answer to questions about the natural world, or assume that most people (including family members) are like-minded or attend church regularly. And modern society, with all its advantages in prosperity (in many parts of the world) and advances in technology, has brought an unprecedented amount of anxiety, stress and “busyness,” all obstacles in the search for God. Many believers also share with atheists and agnostics the desire to be truthful, to see things as they really are. But it’s easy to confuse your...

Google Image I heard an anecdote years ago about an elementary teacher who repeatedly stamped each pupil’s paper with, “You’re special!” Ok, so it could mean, “You’re one of a kind,” or “You’re special to me,” but the irony of stamping everyone’s paper with that phrase was evidently lost on the teacher, and on many of the students if Tim Urban, a blogger for the Huffington Post, is to be believed. Thinking they’re special is one reason people in Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, are unhappy, Urban wrote in a post last year. Lucy, his fictional character from Gen Y, is also part of a yuppie culture that comprises a large portion of Gen Y. “I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group – I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie,” he writes, who think they are “the main characters of a very special story.” Urban has a formula: Happiness = Reality – Expectations. For hi...