Christianity: Not What the Young New Atheist Expected

A cheering story: The Atheist Orthodoxy That Drove Me to Faith . “Faith is something my generation is meant to be casting aside, not taking up,” writes Megan Hodder, writing in the English weekly The Catholic Herald .

I was raised without any religion and was eight when 9/11 took place. Religion was irrelevant in my personal life and had provided my formative years with a rolling-news backdrop of violence and extremism.

Wanting to deal with her (apparently few) worries about atheism, she decided to read the religious enemies of reason. She was, you will have guessed, in for a surprise:

I started by reading Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address, aware that it had generated controversy at the time and was some sort of attempt –futile, of course – to reconcile faith and reason. I also read the shortest book of his I could find,  On Conscience . I expected – and wanted – to find bigotry and illogicality that would vindicate my atheism.

Instead, I was presented with a God who was the Logos: not a supernatural dictator crushing human reason, but the self-expressing standard of goodness and objective truth towards which our reason is oriented, and in which it is fulfilled, an entity that does not robotically control our morality, but is rather the source of our capacity for moral perception, a perception that requires development and formation through the conscientious exercise of free will.

It was a far more subtle, humane and, yes, credible perception of faith than I had expected.

She goes on to describe the changes in her thinking and then in her life that followed  her discovery that Christianity wasn’t ridiculous after all.