While it is often said that there are “no atheists in foxholes,” the experience of war can be a destroyer of faith. The late philosopher John Rawls wrote that he was raised in a “conventionally religious” home. He finished his undergraduate studies and entered the military as a “believing orthodox Episcopalian Christian.” Yet, by June of 1945, he had, in his own words, “abandoned it entirely.”(Rawls 2010, 261)
While claiming to not fully understand this shift himself, Rawls points to three events that took place during this relatively brief period.
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