Author Anne Lamott, an unabashed Christian and political progressive, talks about her conversion and beliefs in this 2006 article and attached video. She also has some harsh words for the ideas that it is OK to hate and that faith alone is enough to get one into heaven:
Faith without works is dead. It’s just not nice to sit around — you can sit around in your prayer breakfast with all this faithy-faith and all this talking and thinking and “hallelujahing” and it’s nothing. It’s nothing to God. I mean, I think it pisses God off.
Though she might sound like an evangelical at times, she has not been welcomed into evangelical communities:
Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I’m not carried in Christian bookstores. You know, a typical Christian bookstore would not carry TRAVELING MERCIES or PLAN B, because I’m irreverent. I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.
After I read this article, I watched Stephen Colbert’s lively 2008 interview of Lamott:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Anne Lamott | ||||
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This article and the above video serve as a good reminder that non-believers should not simplistically categorize all believers to be “the same.”
… that non-believers should not simplistically categorize all believers to be "the same"
And who exactly believes this? I believe all believers are "wrong". (Otherwise I'd by definition not be a non-believer). Otherwise they are all over the map. Just like non-believers are otherwise all over the map.
I know I'm being picky but I find these gratuitous comments annoying though I know they arise from a desire to appear even handed.
Pat
Pat: Some of the new atheists insists that all religious believers, including religious moderates, endorse belief-systems put us on the slippery slope to the next dark ages. I'll name names: Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. I admire them both for many aspects of their writings, but not for this position.
* Life is our moment to find a place in eternity. Leonid S. Sukhorukov ("All About Everything", UK, 2005)