Thanks, Bart, for the clear and actually moving account of your former faith, your questionings, and your eventual abandonment of Christian belief. I was glad to hear you say that you wrote the book not to encourage others to follow you into agnosticism (though I guess that is how the book may well work rhetorically for some), but to encourage all of us to think . That is something I constantly tell people: I believe in the authority of scripture, and in Christian tradition as the community of discourse within which Christians hear that scripture – but also, importantly, in the proper use of reason. Our culture has fallen prey to emotivism, leading people to say ‘I feel’ when they mean ‘I think’, and then – an easy shift – to allow feeling to trump thinking, and then to replace it altogether. That way, I think we agree, lie chaos and folly.
There are two large, general elements of your book, and your blog post, which I want to chew over in this first response. ...