This important question brings to mind some words from literary critic Stanley Fish, decades old now, I think.

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I think my favorite songwriter of all times is Bruce Cockburn. In one of his songs ("Down Where the Death Squad Lives"), he has this haunting line: "Around every evil, there gathers love. Bombs aren't the only things that fall from above down where the death squad lives."

This image of love gathering around evil is especially poignant to me because one of our sons is a leukemia survivor. Learning about his illness meant learning about white blood cells, which quite literally gather around infection so it can be removed from the body.

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Although I served as a pastor for 24 years, I've always been a person
who questions, doubts, wonders, and re-thinks. As soon as I answer my
questions, I begin questioning my answers. So I've been sympathetic to
people who come to me with questions about tenets or traditions,
doctrines or practices.

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I recently heard a provocative interview between Chicago pastor Bill Hybels and British filmmaker Richard Curtis. You will probably know of Curtis' work, even if you don't know his hame: "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Notting Hill," "Love Actually," "The Girl in the Cafe," the Mr.
Bean films.

What you may not know is Curtis' pivotal role in raising awareness and money regarding poverty, HIV, refugees, and other crises in our world today.

For example, earlier this year he piloted the "American Idol Gives Back" project which raised $73 million to help desperately poor people around the world, and Curtis is one of the creative geniuses behind Comic Relief and the UK's leadership regarding the Millennium Development Goals. His "red nose day" is one of the most creative social interventions I've ever heard of.

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Doubt, in my experience, is like a spiritual drought that forces our roots to go deeper. Nearly all of us experience these dry, dark, difficult times when God doesn't seem real and it's hard to keep going, much less growing. Sometimes these low tides of faith are connected with events … the death of a loved one, a broken relationship, the loss of a job, a prolonged illness, questions raised by a book or professor. But sometimes they seem to come out of nowhere; it's sunny and bright outside, but inside you feel dark, cloudy, gray, empty.

As a pastor, I have had to deal with matters of faith and doubt on a daily basis. But it's not just other people's faith struggles I have had to face; I experience my own high and low tides of faith even in the midst of ministry. Through it all I have learned that doubt is far more common than most admit. That's why it helps so much when leaders like Mother Teresa are honest about their doubts.

When people come to me to talk about their doubts, one of the first things I say to them is this: doubt is not always bad. Sometimes doubt is absolutely essential. I think of doubt as analogous to pain.

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I think Christopher Hitchens is, sadly, too often right. History makes this clear, and many of us who are religious have experienced our share of religious irrationality, intolerance, bigotry, contempt, exclusion, violence (if not physical, then verbal insult), and so on - whether with members of our own religion or members of other religions, or even members of no religion.

Unfortunately, religious people don't have a monopoly on these behaviors. This fact may be obscured by the fact that most people in history, by a very large majority, have been religious, so the sample of irreligious people is smaller to begin with. That means that the total number of acts of ignorance and bigotry will be most commonly associated with religious people.

That's why, I think, if we focused in on irreligious people, Hitchens could make the same kind of generalization, substituting "irreligiosity" for "religion." There are plenty of irreligious people who treat women and children badly, who say and do stupid things, and who are full of prejudice.

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