My description of my friend Mike Kinsley’s essay as "Godless" was not meant as an insult in any way. I’m sorry if some interpreted it that way. I was trying to express simply my distance from his experience, not any criticism of it. A reader writes:
I was touched by Mike Kinsley’s essay. How brave of him, I thought, not to fall back on easy consolations. Not all of us unbelievers are as crude or as savage as Hitch. Nor are we all so illogical. He won’t imagine what the world might have been like or would be like if his wish were granted and there had never been organized religion, for instance. Call me an agnostic, because there is always a possibility that my view of the world, however deeply held and hard earned, is wrong or incomplete or, at best, based on misunderstood evidence. But. My daughter Kate’s birthday will be on April 15th. She would have been 41 if she were alive. She died in her shower in Brussels in 1994 of carbon monoxide poisoning. The circumstances of her death were in all ways awful. She was almost 27.
If God is all powerful, why would he let a wonderful, miraculous, beloved young person die in such an awful, hideous, careless, poisonous way? If He knew and didn’t stop it, he is evil. If he knew and couldn’t stop it, he is not God, in that there are limits to his power.
And her loss of her life isn’t the end of it. Her death almost killed her mother, my ex-wife. It deeply hurt her sister and brother…and her step-sister, my step-daughter, who was 12 at the time, was deeply affected by a sense of loss she hadn’t even known the world could provide.
I had been becoming less and less committed to my faith as Kate grew older. We all went to church every Sunday, and gave monies, and then, little by little, we’d stopped: the church seemed to want things to flow toward it, and didn’t really want to create energies flowing the other way….it was, somehow, becoming irrelevant to me; and fundamentalism was [and remains] morally repugnant to me in every way. Faith, whatever it is, isn’t easy or glib or automatic or free of doubt….it just isn’t. Not if you use your head.
Faith had been real to me, beautiful, elevating. The words of Jesus in particular I found [and find] deeply intelligent and morally exquisite and enlightening. The art and the music and architecture of the church universal touch my soul in ways I still fail to understand, and if life were led in music, I’d probably still be a believer.
So my life has been permanently maimed as well. Not what it would have been if I could call Kate on the phone and have a chat; if I could hug her; if I could watch her dazzling life continue to unfold as it was unfolding, in brilliance and wit and humor and with profound intelligence, exuberantly and gracefully growing more and more complex. Such a loss.
We were all damaged by an accident which in a world impelled by God’s justice and love wouldn’t happen.
I know what you, as a believer, will say to me. I said it to others myself in the day. I KNOW the difference between faith and intelligence. I know the deep need to accept, which to the extent I can, I have done.
But I also know this: God wants me to be honest, and frank, and candid, and sure of myself. Especially, He wants me to be honest.
And, honestly, I cannot believe in such a Being.
I know the world is lambent, I know the numinous arisings of light when the wind hits my pond. I understand full well, in part because of Kate’s awful loss, how lucky we are to be here. I, as I age downward into decrepitude, feel the world leaving my grasp, and it hurts almost more than I can say.
I wish, as profoundly as I wish anything, that I could believe, that I could smile and say, oh yes, as I get closer to death, I get closer to Kate. My faith sustains me; all will be well.
All will be well because the world, the physical beautiful world, will go on. And that sustains me, that and only that.
So, Andrew. My response to Michael Kinsley is indeed the opposite of yours. How brave, I think, to confront one’s leaving of the world without blinking and without piteous wailing, and with deep intellectual and emotional honesty.
The Dish 