Robert McKinney is an intelligent man. If he wasn’t, then he would not be able to write as well as he does, and he does write well. But Jennifer Kim writes well also, and her March 17 response to his March 14 letter is a spot-on critique.
A life of religious faith does not mean a life of unquestioning acquiescence to a set of delusional and foolish intellectual propositions or beliefs — beliefs that atheists condemn variously as primitive and preposterous, backward, stupid and contrary to proven knowledge, and even evil — but rather a life of trust, steadfastness and intellectual engagement. Religious faith is an intelligent destination of the human journey representing millennia of profound struggle with and reflection on our experience. It is not the only destination, but it is an honorable one.
Stupid and evil people cannot be prevented from doing stupid and evil things in the name of their service to a higher authority. No one is perfect and neither is religion, which is a human affect. We all live and die within a spectrum of development toward true personhood, and unfortunately some people never progress very far within the spectrum. That is what gives us religiously sincere fools. Sadly, there are many of those.
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