Are evangelicals on another planet? It is a question that most of us who have had contact with charismatic evangelicals have had cause to ask. Sometimes I meet people who suffer from full-on boiled eyeball syndrome, where the whites of the eyes are unnervingly large and shiny. When they talk about God, or spirituality, make me feel a visceral unease. Sometimes such people will try to convert me with miracle stories and then I feel even worse.
A sort of generalised shame for the human race spreads over me when I realise that intelligent people spend years disciplining themselves to believe these things and to turn away from the facts of the world. Intellectually, I can make a case for them, but in my heart I feel they are traitors against our common human enterprise of making sense of the world as it is. People who make God cuddly have flinched in the face of reality. They need a stiff dose of Bertrand Russell.
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