A Letter of Mine, Published in TIME

A few weeks ago, Time Magazine did an issue whose cover story was about the Democrats and Religion. Inside, they had poll data that showed that the biggest turnoff to voters was if a candidate was atheist. Deeply disturbed by this, I shot off a letter to the magazine expressing my thoughts on that fact.

“As a young atheist who was brought up in a Catholic household, I was appalled to see that being atheist was the worst possible position for a presidential candidate. Atheists are not soulless people without morals. One does not need to have faith in order to know right from wrong–it’s called common humanity. It seems the only reason our nation looks for faith within ourselves and in our leaders is that we unfortunately have faith in neither.”

I was rather shocked to find today that my letter was actually published, one of only nine in that issue. My original letter survived the editing process pretty much intact…in fact they clarified it just as I would have. After I sent it in I though I could have been much more clear and concise, but the editors did a damn good job getting my point across clearly. The only big change was the omission of an admittedly off-topic sentence that was a thinly veiled slam against religious people who divide, such as some of those crazy Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christians and Ann Coulter. To be honest, those sentences weren’t needed…but certainly not regretted.