Like a lot of people, I read Michael Scheuer's best-selling book Imperial Hubris and felt edified by someone whose experience in national intelligence gave a critical eye on American foreign policy.
At a certain point, I wondered if he had gone crazy. People whom I once thought were credible seem suspect if they become champions or apologists of racist and fascist political figures. And at some point, I read somewhere that Scheuer was doing just that.
But apparently his decline started earlier. In this 2014 Daily Beast piece by David Frum titled, "Michael Scheuer's Meltdown," we see that Scheuer has indeed become crazy evidenced by his call to assassinate Barack Obama and David Cameron. Scheuer's support of current demagogues reinforces the notion that he has indeed gone crazy.
I had a flash to Michael Scheuer a few days ago in a completely different context: religion.
Since 1979, when at 17 I became afraid of hell, I embarked on the naive notion that perhaps I could free myself from this fear if I could formulate in my mind that non-believers were smart and believers were less smart.
I was so ignorant that I was hopeful that I could read enough books from skeptics who could show me that religious belief was the result of stupidity, madness, or both.
But as I read more and more, I discovered you could be super smart and by all appearances completely sane, or just as sane as anyone else, and be a believer.
Soon enough, I had to abandon the idea that I could rid myself the fear of hell by dismissing believers as stupid.
There were writers smarter than I am making the case for Christianity: Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, C.S. Lewis, Peter Kreeft, Jerry Walls, Marilynne Robinson, N.T. Wright, Timothy Keller, Alan Jacobs, Dale Allison, Rufus Jones, David Bentley Hart, David Dark, and I could go on.
Of course, there is a spectrum of Christian faith with primitive fundamentalism on one end and more liberal interpretations on the other. I notice Jerry Walls, for example, tries to sneak in universalism in his amazing book Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in which he shows the evolution of C.S. Lewis' belief in hell, which came to embrace the idea of purgatory. Many could say that a belief in purgatory is the precursor to universalism, but I digress.
My point is that I have often doubted myself or what I really believe or what is at my core because I worry that I am innately depraved, too irrational, too crazy, or too whatever to trust myself. Therefore, I better get my hell insurance if So And So, a very smart person, is defending hell.
But I got to thinking: How can I trust some other person any more than I can trust myself? How do I know the person whose judgments are affecting fundamental choices I'm making in my life? Would such a change be authentic anyway?
And what if this person whose ideas are influencing me has pulled a Michael Scheuer, that is to say has gone crazy even after drawing me to him with his apparent powers of reason?
The larger point is something Elaine Pagels talks about over and over when she quotes from The Gospel of Thomas: You must find the truth within yourself or perish.
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