Moving on, though, but sticking with the theme of holding people responsible: it’s probably Strauss who has me instinctively siding with you on two points. On the certainty/truth (and forwards!) issue, I think you’re fine moving forward without truths of which you are uncertain—mostly because the first thing I read in Strauss that I had a favorable opinion of was his definition of philosophy as, “essentially not possession of the truth, but quest for the truth. . . . Genuine knowledge of a fundamental question, a thorough understanding of it, is better than blindness to it, or indifference to it, be that indifference or blindness accompanied by knowledge of the answers of a vast number of peripheral or ephemeral questions or not.”

But it was your comment at the end about absenting religious faith from your Weltanschauung that sent me back to Strauss to begin with—I knew I felt this was the safer direction to go in, but couldn’t figure out quite why for a little while. Anyway, this feeling of mine has its root in his distinction between political theology and political philosophy: “By political theology we understand political teachings which are based on divine revelation. Political philosophy is limited to what accessible to the unassisted human mind.”

Of course, I don’t know if Strauss is in your background, so this could all be coincidental (or worse: irrelevant—and I could be asleep!).

Well, in a word: Uh-uh.

I mean, that’s a totally understandable line of thinking. Finding religion is generally treated in the media as this rapturous experience, this moment where, yes, your life is filled with meaning. And while I’m sure that happens to some people — and certainly, the Christian fundamentalists, the most public face of religion in the U.S., have done their level best to make it seem like it happens that way a lot — I contend that the most truly worthwhile of those moments happen after you’ve found religion and are typically much less rapturous, occasionally even bordering on the mundane.

Religion is a practice, right? Now think about any other practice. Playing golf, running a business, writing poetry. Sure, you might have a brilliant play or flash of insight early on, but assuming you take a genuine stab at it, you’re going to have a lot more of those the longer you do it, and they’re probably going to be of better quality. In fact, you’ll probably look back at your earliest such moments and think, “Gosh, I was cute back then.” And you can start doing any of these things for perfectly banal reasons, too, not because you’re so psyched about golf or business or poetry, but because you want to make partner or because your dad is sick and you don’t want the family store to go under or because you have to take a stupid class.

We bark a lot about what the fundamentalists are doing to secular life in this country, and that’s legit, but they’ve done at least as serious a disservice to religion. They’ve really made it seem like religion (or Christianity, at least) is a set of hard-and-fast rules, that God is angry when people don’t follow those rules, and that there has to be some Magical Moment involved in finding Him. But, no, religion (or Christianity, at least, or just God, if that’s easier — I really don’t think He’s that picky) is supposed to welcome anyone, and especially anyone who’s looking for something. It definitely doesn’t have to be Something Big, either, like help with their drug problem.

So, this is not an attempt to proselytize, just an attempt to overturn what I think is (again, understandably) the current conventional wisdom about religion. And lastly, no, God is never the easy answer, dude. It’s like when you’re little and you think being the president would make life so much more simple. I mean, the Guy’s a total cockhead sometimes. He’s worth it, IMHO, but there’s a reason Robert Frost wrote:

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokew on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.