Dec. 22, 2005
 
COMMENTARY: Responding to Perry Mann: Faith in Doubt can be Anti-Intellectual, Too
 
By S. N. Reed
Special to HNN
 
Perry Mann should have been a preacher. For despite all of his pronouncements on the value of having doubt over faith, he just can't get away from exploring the deeps of religion. But it's definitely a little odd, almost like a man who claims to have no use for pumpkin pie, secretly gorging himself by having a whole pie to himself every other week or so.
 
In brief, Perry just can't get enough religion.
 
If he didn't have as much irrational faith in his beloved doubt, he might have some excellent points to make to the religious community of which is so proudly not a part. That is certainly his right as an American, and we all need an outside critique now and then. But he shows how profoundly like the inerrantist Baptist he is by his clinging to doubt above all else. Doubt is Perry's faith. And he's very proud of it, can't you tell? But seriously, a good dose of questioning, which is the sunnier side of doubt, is essential for anyone who really seeks knowledge.
 
However, any open-minded person, using the tools of reason and even emotion with all of its attributes and subjectivity, is not acting in any kind of truly intellectual or reasonable way to be all faith or all doubt, either one. Inquiry into truth is supposed to take the honest truth-seeker wherever it wills, and honest individuals allow truth to unfold before them, not directing its course but following it to the end.
 
Personally, I am far more interested in the person of faith or the skeptic who doesn't appear to have an ax to grind, either way. If, by the lights they have developed over the course of their lives, they come up with what they hope is an honest thesis, they typically don't have to brag about it or put the other guy down. (They don't even have to write columns, beating their chest, acting superior to those who disagree with them, etc.)
 
Perry Mann clearly thinks himself superior for not believing in God. OK. What would help us now is to hear straight from Perry what it is in his life that has led him to this conclusion. THAT might be interesting, whether we find ourselves agreeing with it or not.
 
But just trying to throw cold water on everyone else's Christmas parade appears to be rooted in some kind of anger somewhere, and until Perry brings that further out of the undergrowth for us to see, we're at a loss to understand what his beef with God is.
 
Agnostics, it is said, just don't know if there's a God. Atheists, however, are those who wanted to love God, to believe in a good God, but have had something happen to them to make them seriously doubt the existence of a good and holy Higher Being.
 
Perhaps Perry will shed some light on what he classifies himself, for without more of an explanation, he's beginning to come across as faithful to his doubt as a Baptist is to his scriptures.
 
Zealots are not limited to religious circles. They come from all belief systems and in all shapes and sizes. Everyone has a God of some sort, and you can always tell the funny ones when their God, as described by them, sound peculiarly like themselves.
 
S.N. Reed is a former Charleston talk radio host.