This was an interesting bit out of a book I am reading , Discernment: A Study in Ecstasy and Evil by Morton Kelsey.
Many Christians have a strange attitude toward disbelief and disbelievers. They treat them as the worst of sinners and shun them the way that many people shun the sick and the poor. Yet if there is a meaningful reality which we humans can know and be touched by, and we are unable to find it, the trouble is with our understanding and with our experience; our morals are not defective. Perhaps the reason for this attitude toward agnostics and atheists is the unconscious lack of belief on the part of many Christians in the last three or four hundred years. Condemning others may well be the Christians’ personal reaction to their own unconscious doubt. It threatens them to have to face and handle someone who does not believe as they say they do.
He goes on to describe practices that need to be evident in people who desire to help others, one of which is to be an example of the meaning to which they direct the person seeking meaning. So, if I want to help anyone questioning issues of faith or the meaning of life, I must be living a life which has meaning, is authentic and consistent with my faith. I will have had to have wrestled my way through some of the issues others face to a place of knowing who I am, some of what has meaning in life for myself and authentic faith lived out in action in my life.
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