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TrustInJesus版 - Rethinking His Religion
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b********n
发帖数: 38600
1
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/opinion/sunday/bruni-a-cathol
March 24, 2012
Rethinking His Religion
By FRANK BRUNI
I MOVED into my freshman-year dorm at the University of North Carolina after
many of the other men on the hall. One had already begun decorating. I
spotted the poster above his desk right away. It showed a loaf of bread and
a chalice of red wine, with these words: “Jesus invites you to a banquet in
his honor.”
This man attended Catholic services every Sunday in a jacket and tie,
feeling that church deserved such respect. I kept a certain distance from
him. I’d arrived at college determined to be honest about my sexual
orientation and steer clear of people who might make that uncomfortable or
worse. I figured him for one of them.
About two years ago, out of nowhere, he found me. His life, he wanted me to
know, had taken interesting turns. He’d gone into medicine, just as he’d
always planned. He’d married and had kids. But he’d also strayed from his
onetime script. As a doctor, he has spent a part of his time providing
abortions.
For some readers his journey will be proof positive of Rick Santorum’s
assertion last month that college is too often godless and corrupting. For
others, it will be a resounding affirmation of education’s purpose.
I’m struck more than anything else by how much searching and asking and
reflecting he’s done, this man I’d so quickly discounted, who pledged a
fraternity when he was still on my radar and then, when he wasn’t, quit in
protest over how it had blackballed a Korean pledge candidate and a gay one.
Because we never really talked after freshman year, I didn’t know that, nor
did I know that after graduation he ventured to a desperately poor part of
Africa to teach for a year. College, he recently told me, had not only given
him a glimpse of how large the world was but also shamed him about how
little of it he knew.
In his 30s he read all 11 volumes of “The Story of Civilization,” then
tackled Erasmus, whose mention in those books intrigued him. When he told me
this I was floored: I knew him freshman year as a gym rat more than a
bookworm and extrapolated his personality and future from there.
During our recent correspondence, he said he was sorry for any impression he
might have given me in college that he wasn’t open to the candid
discussions we have now. I corrected him: I owed the apology — for
misjudging him.
He grew up in the South, in a setting so homogenous and a family so
untroubled that, he said, he had no cause to question his parents’
religious convictions, which became his. He said that college gave him cause
, starting with me. Sometime during freshman year, he figured out that I was
gay, and yet I didn’t conform to his prior belief that homosexuals were “
deserving of pity for their mental illness.” I seemed to him sane and sound
.
He said that we talked about this once — I only half recall it — and that
the exchange was partly why he remembered me two decades later.
Questioning his church’s position on homosexuality made him question more.
He read the Bible “front to back and took notes of everything I liked and
didn’t like,” he said.
“There’s a lot of wisdom there,” he added, “but it’s a real mistake not
to think about it critically.”
He also read books on church history and, he said, “was appalled at the
behavior of the church while it presumed to teach all of us moral behavior.
” How often had it pushed back at important science? Vilified important
thinkers?
Even so, he added to his teaching duties in Africa a weekly, extracurricular
Bible study for the schoolchildren. But the miseries he witnessed made him
second-guess the point of that, partly because they made him second-guess
any god who permitted them.
He saw cruelties born of the kind of bigotry that religion and false
righteousness sometimes abet. A teenage girl he met was dying of sepsis from
a female circumcision performed with a kitchen knife. He asked the male
medical worker attending to her why such crude mutilation was condoned, and
was told that women otherwise were overly sexual and “prone to prostitution
.”
“Isn’t it just possible,” he pushed back, “that women are prone to
poverty, and men are prone to prostitution?”
He has thought a lot about how customs, laws and religion do and don’t jibe
with women’s actions and autonomy.
“In all centuries, through all history, women have ended pregnancies
somehow,” he said. “They feel so strongly about this that they will
attempt abortion even when it’s illegal, unsafe and often lethal.”
In decades past, many American women died from botched abortions. But with
abortion’s legalization, “those deaths virtually vanished.”
“If doctors and nurses do not step up and provide these services or if so
many obstacles and restrictions are put into place that women cannot access
the services, then the stream of women seeking abortions tends to flow
toward the illegal and dangerous methods,” he said.
He had researched and reflected on much of this by the time he graduated
from medical school, and so he decided to devote a bit of each week to
helping out in an abortion clinic. Over years to come, in various settings,
he continued this work, often braving protesters, sometimes wearing a
bulletproof vest.
He knew George Tiller, the Kansas abortion provider shot dead in 2009 by an
abortion foe.
THAT happened in a church, he noted. He hasn’t belonged to one since
college. “Religion too often demands belief in physical absurdities and
anachronistic traditions despite all scientific evidence and moral progress,
” he said.
And in too many religious people he sees inconsistencies. They speak of life
’s preciousness when railing against abortion but fail to acknowledge how
they let other values override that concern when they support war, the death
penalty or governments that do nothing for people in perilous need.
He has not raised his young children in any church, or told them that God
exists, because he no longer believes that. But he wants them to have the
community-minded values and altruism that he indeed credits many religions
with fostering. He wants them to be soulful, philosophical.
So he rounded up favorite quotations from Emerson, Thoreau, Confucius,
Siddhartha, Gandhi, Marcus Aurelius, Martin Luther King and more. From the
New Testament, too. He put each on a strip of paper, then filled a salad
bowl with the strips. At dinner he asks his kids to fish one out so they can
discuss it.
He takes his kids outside to gaze at stars, which speak to the wonder of
creation and the humility he wants them to feel about their place in it.
He’s big on humility, asking, who are we to go to the barricades for human
embryos and then treat animals and their habitats with such contempt? Or to
make such unforgiving judgments about people who err, including women who
get pregnant without meaning to, unequipped for the awesome responsibility
of a child?
As a physician, he said, you’re privy to patients’ secrets — to their
truths — and understand that few people live up to their own stated ideals.
He has treated a philandering pastor, a drug-abusing financier. “I see
life as it really is,” he told me, “not how we wish it were.”
He shared a story about one of the loudest abortion foes he ever encountered
, a woman who stood year in and year out on a ladder, so that her head would
be above other protesters’ as she shouted “murderer” at him and other
doctors and “whore” at every woman who walked into the clinic.
One day she was missing. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s O.K.,’ ” he recalled
. He walked into an examining room to find her there. She needed an abortion
and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After
the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose
, unprincipled.
She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my
relationship isn’t where it should be.”
“Nothing like life,” he responded, “to teach you a little more.”
A week later, she was back on her ladder.
b********n
发帖数: 38600
2
"And in too many religious people he sees inconsistencies. They speak of
life’s preciousness when railing against abortion but fail to acknowledge
how they let other values override that concern when they support war, the
death penalty or governments that do nothing for people in perilous need"
“Religion too often demands belief in physical absurdities and
anachronistic traditions despite all scientific evidence and moral progress,
J*****3
发帖数: 4298
3
这位woman是真基督徒吗?
He shared a story about one of the loudest abortion foes he ever encountered
, a woman who stood year in and year out on a ladder, so that her head would
be above other protesters’ as she shouted “murderer” at him and other
doctors and “whore” at every woman who walked into the clinic.
One day she was missing. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s O.K.,’ ” he recalled
. He walked into an examining room to find her there. She needed an abortion
and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After
the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose
, unprincipled.
She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my
relationship isn’t where it should be.”
“Nothing like life,” he responded, “to teach you a little more.”
A week later, she was back on her ladder.
E*****m
发帖数: 25615
4
這女人太神奇了!
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相关话题的讨论汇总
话题: he话题: his话题: him话题: she话题: abortion