This is an Excerpt from my new book Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God
Which "me" should be running the show? We're all in the closet, so to speak. We barely come out to ourselves and never completely to others. I've never met an unequivocal atheist or religious believer. I've only met people of two, three or four or more minds--people just like me. Atheists sometimes pray and eloquent preachers secretly harbor doubts. The evangelist Billy Graham preached certain salvation and heaven guaranteed yet privately told my dad, a friend and fellow evangelist, that he feared death and had many doubts.
We're all of at least two minds. We play a role and define that role as "me" because labels and membership in a tribe make the world feel a little safer. When I was raising my children, I pretended to be grown-up Daddy. But alone with my thoughts, I was still just me. I'm older now, and some younger people may think I know something. I do! I know how much I can never know.
Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Christian, you are that because of where and when you were born. If you are an atheist, you are that because of a book or two you read, or who your parents were and the century in which you were born. Don't delude yourself: there are no good reasons for anything, just circumstances.
Don't delude yourself: you may describe yourself to others by claiming a label of atheist, Jew, evangelical, gay or straight but you know that you are really lots more complicated than that, a gene-driven primate and something more. Want to be sure you have THE TRUTH about yourself and want to be consistent to that truth? Then prepare to go mad. Or prepare to turn off your brain and cling to some form or other of fundamentalism, be that religious or secular.
You will always be more than one person. You will always embody contradiction. You--like some sort of quantum mechanicals physics experiment--will always be in two places at once.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer his new book is:
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Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book -- WHY I'M AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD