I met John Marks, author of Reasons to Believe during a screening of Purple State of Mind. Given that we're both transplanted Southerners, I was interested in exploring why he chose to leave the faith of his childhood. Following is a short interview of what I hope will be an ongoing conversation.

Briefly describe your childhood.

I grew up in a nominally Christian home. My folks were Presbyterians, and we went to church on Sundays and said prayer before meals. Religion wasn't a big deal in our home, except as a mostly unspoken tradition.

Why do you say that had you been pastored by Bob Russell, you might not have left the faith?

Pastors are surrogate fathers and mean a great deal to a lot of young Christians I've met. In my experience as a teenager, I never had a strong adult mentor who represented the faith in any mature way. Most of my "pastors" were Young Life leaders or youth group leaders who were decent people but didn't have much intellectual or theological wattage. The pastor of my parents' church was a distant figure who seemed to have little or no relation to my life.

How did your encounter with Craig Detweiler, your college roommate at Davidson College, inform your faith?

At first it gave my faith a new sense of community, because I could share it with a close friend who also loved movies and music, but the experience turned out to be off-putting when Craig's evolution in the faith couldn't make room for my development as an artist.

What happened when you were covering the Balkans for U.S. News & World Report that made you stop believing in God?

I met a Muslim refugee whose village had been destroyed. He told me that his last hope resided in his sons, who had been taken prisoner by Serbs and would be released at war's end. My interpreter whispered in my ear that his sons were dead. I knew this, and he didn't, but I couldn't be the one to tell him. The perversity of that moment shattered for good my capacity to believe in some sovereign order in the universe.

As a former reporter, what reflections do you have on the role of religion in the public square -- especially as we head into the 2008 election?

Faith is now a diffused force across the full political spectrum. Four years ago, it was a much more targeted and quantifiable factor, mostly on the side of the Republican Party. No one will have an easy time this year trying to decide which political choice is biblical.

What do you want for Christians to take away from this book? That there is a conversation to be had with non-Christians that doesn't involve rancor and mockery?

The conversation is necessary, but it doesn't have to be anodyne. No one has to compromise, but everyone has to listen and show a modicum of respect. It's simple and hugely difficult at the same time.

How was this book the genesis for the documentary Purple State of Mind?

When I sold it to HarperCollins, I immediately called Craig Detweiler, my sophomore college roommate, because he had known me best when I believed. I wanted to go back in time and rehash the past. He wanted to turn on the cameras.

Any thoughts on how we can continue the dialogue that Craig and you have begun?

The best bet is to be determined in spirit, modest in ambition, at least at first. Find the one or two people whose company you enjoy and yet with whom you disagree and start to listen. If they listen, too, then there is hope. Alcohol and caffeine can be immensely helpful in the right doses.

Becky Garrison's books include The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail.

Following the publication of The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail I received hordes of books critiquing Dawkins & Co. While most of the responses tended to veer off into Kirk Cameron country, I found a few gems such as John F. Haught's God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Following is an interview with Dr. Haught, senior fellow of Science & Religion at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center.

Why do you call Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris softcore atheists?

Because they fail to probe deeply into the logical, ethical, and cultural implications of a consistent atheism. They think of belief in God more as a nuisance to be removed than as a stimulus to radical personal, cultural, and ethical upheaval. I contrast them with "hardcore" atheists—writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. The latter all realized that atheism is not easy to pull off without seismic implications. As Sartre said, the road to atheism is "a cruel and long-range affair." The true atheist must be willing to risk madness (Nietzsche) and embrace the absurd (Camus). In my view, the hardcore atheists were not consistently atheistic either, but at least they attempted to think out what atheism would really mean if it were true.

How do you respond to the new atheists' claims that all faith is irrational?

They define faith very narrowly as "belief without evidence." To be rational, they claim, we must empty our minds of any ideas for which scientifically accessible "evidence" is in principle unavailable. Since religions can claim no such evidence, they must be irrational. However, the claim that science is the most authoritative way to truth is itself a belief without evidence. If all faith is irrational, then so is the new atheism, by definition.

How is intolerance of tolerance a truly novel feature to the new atheists' solution to the problems of human misery?

According to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, as soon as people embrace even the most innocent beliefs they are opening up a space in their minds for the eventual invasion of the most monstrous forms of religious lunacy (such as the ideas behind suicide bombings). So, to eliminate much human misery, let's get rid of faith altogether! Such intolerance of faith is by no means new. What is new is the new atheists' intolerance of the modern liberal principle that the faith of others should be respected. By respecting faith, they claim, we are all accomplices in evil. The irony here is that the new atheists seem to forget that the freedom to advance their own uncritical belief in scientism and scientific naturalism is also due to the modern liberal tolerance of "faith."

Why do you diagnose the new atheists as suffering from a bad case of explanatory monism?

Explanatory monism is the reductionist postulate that there is only one valid explanatory slot available to make sense of things. For example, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins assume that since we can now understand morality and religion in terms of evolutionary biology, theological explanation is superfluous. I argue instead that both theology and evolutionary science can contribute to our understanding.

Elaborate what you mean by this statement: "deepening of theology that has occurred in previous conceptions between serious atheists and Christians has little chance of happening in the works of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris?"

In God and the New Atheism I show that that the new atheists are as literalist in their understanding of scriptures and theology as are the anti-Darwinian religious fundamentalists they oppose. The level of challenge they pose to contemporary theology is glaringly low in comparison with serious atheists such as Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche who at least knew enough about religious thought to engage theologians of the stature of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, or Karl Rahner.

What are some ways we can create spaces for this serious dialogue to begin?

The new atheist phenomenon emerges from and appeals to a culture shaped in great measure by a noxious blend of poor science education with and equally undeveloped religious and theological education. There is greater need than ever today to improve both. Current interest in the science and religion dialogue is a hopeful development, but it needs to take place at every level of education, not least in seminaries and schools of theology.

Publishers Weekly cited Becky Garrison as one of "four evangelicals with fresh views" alongside Jim Wallis, Shane Claiborne, and Ron Sider.

This past Friday Bill Maher crossed the WGA picket line to offer this witticism on Late Night with Conan O'Brien:

You can't be a rational person six days a week … and on one day of the week, go to a building, and think you're drinking the blood of a two-thousand-year-old space god.

If you polled the audience, my hunch is the majority would normally prefer Maher over Mass. But not this time. Even Catholic Conan was at a loss for words. Looks like Maher might have been on a mission to eradicate religion but he ended up shooting unbiblical blanks.

In all my years as a practicing Christian and a religious journalist, I have never encountered anyone who thought they were actually committing cannibalism as part of their Sunday ritual.With all the faith follies transpiring these days, surely an accomplished comedian such as Bill Maher can find ample fodder without resorting to bad theology. In an ironic twist, these are the same folks who chide Christians (and rightly so) for employing shoddy science and spouting "Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it"-rhetoric.

While I'm tempted to throw the complete works of Henri Nouwen, Phyllis Tickle, and N.T. Wright at both strident secularists and their religious counterparts whenever they spout such nefarious nonsense, there is that whole turn the other cheek biz. Besides, as I've learned over the years, one cannot reason with the unreasonable.

Here's where the court jester or the satirist enters the scene. Just as there have always been those who misuse and misinterpret religion for their own personal and financial gain, there have a few of us crazy enough to take on the ungodly giants. As a religious satirist, I seek to deconstruct everything and anyone that tries to keep people away from the love of God. Whenever men try to create God in their own image or eradicate God from the face of the earth, I'm right behind them kicking down their prized creations. (Yes, sometimes I can kick a bit too hard, and for that I apologize.) Right after I've smashed these fallen idols to smithereens, for a few brief moments, a calm comes over me. I can see very tiny bits of God shining through the cracks.

It's these glimpses of God that keep me from cracking up.

Becky Garrison's is the author of The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail: Their Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith.

When I went to check my post office box after Thanksgiving, among the pile of mail waiting for me were review copies of Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great about Christianity and Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.

I first picked up D'Souza's bestseller. Throughout this book, he seems to possessed an amazing self-confidence that all the world's problems could be solved if only we would just become Christians. It reminded me of those books I read in my twenties back when I thought I knew all the answers. It's only been within the past few years that I've learned to start asking the right questions.

Yet, I have to admit that a side of me wished that I still possessed that absolute certainty about my faith. This year hasn't been an easy one for me on many fronts. In fact, I don't know where I'd be without my spiritual friends, who sometimes prayed on my behalf when I was too distracted to think straight.

When I picked up Come by My Light, I discovered a stark honesty that caught me off guard. Mother Teresa was not the woman the world thought we knew. As Shane Claiborne noted when I interviewed him for The Wittenburg Door, whenever people ask him about his trip to Calcutta, "they say, 'Oh, you met Mother Teresa,' like she glows in the dark or something."

While rest of the world put her on a pious pedestal, this seemingly simple nun from Calcutta spent most of her ministry wandering in the wilderness. She pours out her personal pain in private letters that she penned to her spiritual director and others in her life. These letters indicate that ever since she began her ministry to the poor, the voice of Jesus that guided her to start this work became silent. This silence continued throughout her entire ministry. She describes the darkness with a piercing honesty that brought me to tears.

Pray for me - for within me everything is icy cold - it is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness. As long as our Lord has all the pleasure - I really do not count.

As expected, atheists like Christopher Hitchens use her personal pain as further evidence that God does not exist. Hitchens gloats, "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person."

Unlike this anti-God guru, Mother Teresa knew that just because God was absent from her heart, that didn't mean God had abandoned her. With a Job-like sense of determination, she learned to embrace this darkness as a part of her ministry.

Let Him do with me whatever He wants, as He wants, for as long as He wants. If my darkness is to light some soul - even if it be nothing to nobody - I am perfectly happy - to be God's flower of the field.

Just as I'm about to finish this book, Shane Claiborne just happened to arrive in New York City on the first Sunday of Advent. (For a recap of that visit, see "What Would Jesus Buy?") I'm not about to call him a saint because I know he'd just start to giggle and throw paper airplanes at me. This ordinary radical relayed stories of finding hope and healing through his work with those spiritual souls that society has discarded. I couldn't have asked for a better Advent candle to help illuminate my darkness.

During my interview with Shane, he remarked:

Someone asked me after she died, 'Is her work going to live on?' I actually think Mother Teresa died a long time ago when she submitted herself to Christ, and the thing that everyone loves about her was her work, that's Jesus. That's going to live forever. I've been to Calcutta since Mother Teresa died, and there were more people there than were ever there when she was alive. She's sort of like the seed that dies, and fruit is born.

For those who find themselves struggling in the darkness during this Advent season, I highly recommend reflecting on Mother Teresa's words. Through her prayers of pain, I pray that you can be reminded that you are not alone.

Becky Garrison's books include The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail: Their Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith (Thomas Nelson, January 2008), Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church, and Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church.

Back in 2004, Anthony Flew, the world’s most prominent atheist, stated he believed in God. Since this pronouncement, some of his fellow atheists treat him as though he's gone over to the dark side and literally lost his mind. In a nutshell, they feel this champion of their cause has flown the coop, as it were, and is being used as a pawn by those Christians who need someone of Flew’s stature to give weight to the entire Intelligent Design movement. (See The New York Times article, "The Turning of an Atheist").

Nadda, nope, no way. Not so fast.

Let's reflect on what Flew actually said when he came out as a theist. He told The Associated Press that "his current ideas have some similarity with American ‘intelligent design’ theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life."

As Christine Rosen wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "Mr. Flew is not quite the crusading convert his book title suggests: He did not embrace Christianity, but Deism. As he told Christianity Today, he feels more spiritual kinship with the skeptical Thomas Jefferson than with Jesus. 'I understand why Christians are excited, but if they think I am going to become a convert to Christ in the near future, they are very much mistaken,' he said."

Pick up a copy of Flew’s latest book, There is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, and you’ll see that a thinker of his stature can’t be painted in simple monochromatic colors. Rather, this biography, co-written by Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese, reveals that Flew’s lifelong mantra was to follow the policy of Plato's Socrates: "We must follow the argument wherever it leads." After this preacher’s son penned his infamous short paper,"Theology and Falsification" in 1950, he assumed the position as the leading atheist apologist. Later in life, the evidence led him to conclude that the complexity of nature and the origin of life can only be explained by the presence of a super-intelligence.

While we’re at it, let’s not pull out the ageism card willy-nilly. If the critics are correct that Flew has truly gone "off his rocker," I doubt a publisher of HarperOne’s stature would have tackled this project. I’m not about to defend any publisher’s entire catalogue but if you skim their offerings, you’ll see that except for a few bits of New Thought nonsense, they tend to produce serious scholarship, not shoddy schlock. Furthermore, as I interviewed N.T. Wright for The Wittenburg Door and spent some time with him at Soularize 2007, I can attest that he would not have contributed to this dialogue if he wasn't convinced this was a worthy endeavor.

The flurry over Flew raises this question for me. Why do we feel the need to put the other in a prescribed belief box instead of allowing space to differ and dialogue?

Becky Garrison is the author of The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail: Their Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith (Thomas Nelson, January 2008).

Faithful Progressive offers this insightful comparison of religious extremists and their secular counterparts.

The historical trends which led to the rise of the simplistic and hateful religious right seem to be operating with full force among atheists as well. Simple fear has a lot to do with it, and fear is rarely the source of the best of moral thinking and behavior. And the same reluctance to speak out that at first characterized the mainline Christian response to the religious right seems to paralyze decent, ethical atheists and their leaders from calling an intolerant atheist what he really is: a dangerous bigot.

Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens (aka the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse) grabbed the media spotlight by bellowing out bestsellers. But when researching my book The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail: The Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith, I found other atheists who choose to sing a more tolerant tune.

For example, in my email interview with Hemant Mehta, aka the Friendly Atheist, I asked him why he wasn't one of Dawkins' disciples. He replied, "In message, I am. In tone and style, I'm not. I'd much rather engage in a dialogue with religious people. I know I have the facts behind me and, as an atheist, I shouldn't fear holding my own in a debate or conversation. The New Atheists appear as if they'd like nothing to do with anyone who proclaims a religion. I think there is room to work with the religious while at the same time showing them the merits of an atheist perspective."

While Mehta differs in both his approach and some of his views with Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard, they both share a desire to dial down the rhetoric. During my phone conversation with Epstein, he noted how "Christians have a responsibility to reach out to moderate humanists, because by shunning those who want to work with them, they're playing into the hands of the angry atheists."

Where I've found considerable common ground with Epstein and Mehta is that we've both witnessed ample evidence where both New Atheists and certain Christians have invested too much energy into converting the other instead of seeking out areas of cooperation around issues such as the environment, human rights campaigns, and separation of church and state issues. Also, we've both caught heat from our respective camps for our decision to engage in dialogue with our perceived "enemies." Simply put, we'd like to see more attention paid to cooperative acts of charity instead of engaging in Jerry Springer-style free-for-alls that all too often define 21st century intellectual discourse.

Now, I am not proposing a wishy-washy anything goes scenario where Christians park their faith at the door. However, it seems to me there's too much at stake for us not to start exploring the common areas of our humanity, so we can start to build bridges instead of bombs. How can we all move past our prejudices and our distrust of others so we can allow for a safe space to dialogue?

Becky Garrison's other books include Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church and Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church.