Choosing My Religion
by the co-author of Freakonomics. A couple of quotes, in between packing for the big move.
"I had given myself many a headache thinking such thoughts. But, I realized, after a time you have to tell yourself to shut up and get on with the business of living. I couldn't reduce my journey to some neat algebraic equation any more easily than I could do the same for my parents'. Even John Henry Newman, the nineteenth-century cardinal my parents admired, had been stymied when he tried to summarize his conversion. 'For who can know himself,' he wrote, 'and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him?'
"A multitude of influences indeed. Our conversions involved every circumstance of our lives: dead parents and overbearing parents, inadequacies and arrogances, the fears of emptiness and the hopes of bounty. A person could go mad considering the possibilities. But then, if you are lucky, you recognize that it is God you are wrestling with, not just your own tired mind, and at a certain point, knowing that is enough."
"If I am sure of one thing about God, it is that our most brilliant ideas about Him are sheer guesswork."
"I had given myself many a headache thinking such thoughts. But, I realized, after a time you have to tell yourself to shut up and get on with the business of living. I couldn't reduce my journey to some neat algebraic equation any more easily than I could do the same for my parents'. Even John Henry Newman, the nineteenth-century cardinal my parents admired, had been stymied when he tried to summarize his conversion. 'For who can know himself,' he wrote, 'and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him?'
"A multitude of influences indeed. Our conversions involved every circumstance of our lives: dead parents and overbearing parents, inadequacies and arrogances, the fears of emptiness and the hopes of bounty. A person could go mad considering the possibilities. But then, if you are lucky, you recognize that it is God you are wrestling with, not just your own tired mind, and at a certain point, knowing that is enough."
"If I am sure of one thing about God, it is that our most brilliant ideas about Him are sheer guesswork."