Since the time we launched I have never been so enthralled, learned so much or been so fulfilled by a subject. It has changed my perspective on life. It is clearly what I was meant to do.
Here are five things I have learned in these five years:
1. Nobody knows.
My favorite bumper sticker and the guiding wisdom for me every day is this: “I don’t know and you don’t either.”
An atheist father was trying to explain to his son that there was no such thing as God. “But Dad,” asked the boy, “how do you know?”
“You’ll just have to take it on faith,” said the father.
That says it all.
We are all taking our beliefs or lack of beliefs on faith.
Although I called myself an atheist when we started this site, I no longer do, thanks to Jon Meacham, the religious scholar and former Newsweek editor who helped launch the site. He also served as co-moderator until last year, when The Washington Post Co. sold Newsweek.
We were having an argument over whether or not I was an atheist. Finally, Jon said something that resonated. He said, “You don’t want to define yourself negatively, and you know nothing about religion.” He gave me a list of books to read and told me to go study religion. If afterward I insisted on calling myself an atheist, he argued, at least I would know what I was talking about.
I was astonished, engaged and finally enlightened by what I read and ashamed at how little I really knew about religion. I’m still reading and still learning, and it seems the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.
I don’t call myself agnostic. That doesn’t work for me. It simply means you don’t know. By that definition we are all agnostic. The pope is agnostic. We may believe, but we don’t know. I wouldn’t call myself a seeker, either. If I had to define myself, I would say I was a learner. And this has been an extraordinary learning experience.
2. Religions are the same — and not.
In the process of educating myself in our first year of “On Faith,” I took a three-week tour around the world to study the Great Faiths. It was a remarkable, if exhausting, trip to Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, India (Amritsar on the Ganges), China, Tibet, Japan, India again (the Sikh Golden Temple), Ethiopia, Albania and Turkey. I had hoped to have a transcendent experience, to be in touch with the divine. The trip had its moments, but there is something about the 5 a.m. baggage call in the lobby every morning that brings you back to reality.
Loading...
Comments