Domains of Disbelief

The right to hold a belief matters more than the content of any belief.
I came out of three years writing a book about disbelief more convinced of this — and more compassionate to believers — than when I started.
I am an atheist. The closest friend I made during my years in the United States was Pastor Bob Miller of West Chester, Pennsylvania. We took long walks together and we argued about God. The disagreement was, in the end, simple: he held a deep and genuine conviction in the existence and teachings of the God of the Bible, and I did not. What we shared was almost everything else — the mind, people, how to treat someone sitting on the pavement asking for help. Bob would never walk past such a person; he would stop, ask their name, and treat them as another human being first. Together we built a small self-reflection tool for pastors and missionaries, and he often invited me to work with him at his missionary school. He never asked me to believe in God to remain his friend. I never expected him not to.

Bob has been gone more than a decade now. The conversations are not.

During the lockdowns I took an essay I had written years earlier on Pascal’s wager and slowly grew it into a book. Three years of writing settled a question I had been turning over for much longer.

My beliefs do not matter. I am an atheist; so what. But other people’s beliefs do not matter in the same way either. Flat-earthers are welcome to their flat earth. The thing that matters, and matters vehemently, is the individual freedom to hold beliefs at all.
This is not relativism. Disbelief draws a hard line: where belief enters the domains that govern other people — science, law, governance — evidence and logic must rule. Those are the domains of disbelief. But where belief sits in private conviction, in friendship, in the inner life, it is not the rest of us’ business to police it.

Skepticism without that distinction is not skepticism. It is just a different kind of certainty.