My five lessons from On Faith -

My five lessons from “On Faith”

Friday, November 25th, 2011

It was five years ago this month that we launched On Faith. The idea was to inform and educate about all faiths (and no faith) and to initiate an on-going discussion about the role of religion, values and ethics in our daily lives. I hoped that after learning more, people would become more accepting of those who held different beliefs. Pluralism was the goal.

I have never been so enthralled, learned so much or been so fulfilled by any subject so much as this. It has totally changed my perspective on life. It was clearly what I was meant to do. From the volume of emails and comments, I know that others find the site as informative, provocative, thoughtful and entertaining as I 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.

Though 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 and 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. Read more