Faith of a Skeptic  December 21, 2007 RSS Feed Print   • Comment
When reporting about religion, I am often asked about my own
beliefs. My response is usually evasive, though at an unspoken
level, it runs something like this: "Hey, I'm the neutral
observer here; I don't have to account for my religion!"  To
which a more truthful inner voice replies: "Baloney! You're no
Martian anthropologist. And even if you were, you'd still have
beliefs about ultimate matters, and those beliefs would
inevitably affect what you thought about those quaint
Earthlings."  There's no escaping the fact that where we come
from colors what we see. So where do I come from?  Starting most
superficially, I come to the job not as a "religion
correspondent"—a grandiose title if there ever was one—but as a
journalist who has devoted much of his career to writing about
culture, ideas, society, and the recurrent follies of human
experience that collectively we call history.  To say that
religion is part of all this is, to put it mildly, an