The Object
of Much Debate

You may know the old story of the blind men and an elephant — each one touching a different part, each one certain of what they've found, none of them wrong, none of them right. It is a good story. But I have my own.

A group of seekers enters a dark cave in search of Truth. They descend to the deepest chamber, where the darkness is absolute — they cannot see their hand in front of their face. And there, in that darkness, they feel a presence. An object. If the cave were to fill with light, the object would overwhelm them. Blind them. Perhaps destroy them. The darkness is not the obstacle. The darkness is the only condition under which the thing can be approached at all.

They reach out and touch it. Some feel heat. Others cold. Some find it hard, others soft. The object is a myriad of contradictions — and each one is true in its way. But the greater truth, the actual Truth, is that the object is the sum of all of those contradictions. It transcends them. And the only way the seekers can begin to see it is by speaking to one another — describing what they feel, trusting what others report, and listening as if each voice reveals something their own hands cannot reach.

In hearing each other, they each see more. And more of that object — that object of much debate — is revealed to them all.

That is how I see the thing most people call God. Every tradition, every doubt, every conversion and every quiet departure — each one is a hand on a different part of something too large to hold.

I didn't arrive at uncertainty by avoiding faith. I was raised in the evangelical church, and that formation shaped me deeply — and damaged me in ways that I am still coming to terms with. What followed was a long search: Catholic mysticism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism. I filtered everything through humanism and universalist thought. In each tradition I found something genuinely luminous. And in each one, eventually, I found the same thing that had sent me running from the faith of my childhood — the human instinct to take something infinite and build a fence around it.

That cavern is what this place is trying to be. A space dark enough to approach the thing honestly — where no single light source blinds us, and where what we each feel is only the beginning of what we might collectively see. I made it because I think the world is fracturing along the lines of what we believe — or what we believe others believe. Religious division runs deeper than most of us want to admit. It shapes politics, community, family, and the quiet ways we decide who is worth listening to. I don't think tolerance is enough. Tolerance is just agreeing not to fight. I want something harder and more interesting than that.

What I want is honest conversation between people who do not agree. Not debate — the object has had enough of that. Nobody comes here to win. Not therapy — nobody comes here to be fixed. Just the willingness to say what you actually believe, mean it fully, and sit with someone who sees it entirely differently without needing them to be wrong.

The framework is simple. Six essays, one series: What I Believe. Who I Believe. When I Believe. Where I Believe. Why I Believe. How I Believe. The journalist's questions, turned inward. You write your answers. Others read them. Sometimes a conversation begins. We see where it goes from there.

The first two voices here are mine and a friend's — an Episcopalian priest I have known mostly through letters, and am only now beginning to know in person. If that image means anything to you — a searching atheist and a priest, in genuine correspondence, finding more common ground than either expected — then you are probably in the right place.

"The name that can be named is not the Name."

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1

Once you name the thing, you begin to control it. And faith was never meant to be controlled. This community is for people who understand that — whatever they happen to call their beliefs.

— BC Gordon, Founder