Russell Wayne Baker
From Philosopedia
Baker, Russell Wayne (14 August 1925— )
Baker, a noted newspaper columnist, humorist, Pulitzer Prize winners, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has written,
- One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce, and punish fraud, hypocrisy, and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned, and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning, and hanging were Christian things to do.
He lost his faith when he was five and his father died, he wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Growing Up. “After that I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone’s God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.”
