It’s simple: Ancient man created the gods to explain the world and their existence. Ancient man also thought the earth was flat. Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die. Most people don’t want to accept death, so they search for alternatives. It’s understandable, albeit 100 percent misguided. Live your life, fill every day, and at the end stand tall, shake your fist at the indifferent sky, and say, “I did it my way.” The proposal of religious people that we will be fired up into the sky and sit on a happy cloud for eternity undermines everything we struggle and fight for in life.

At this interview, the company basically strung my buddy along further, asking him to come back in a week with more information … prompting his wife to write as her Facebook status, “So much for praying.” And she was crying all day, according to my friend. During our conversation late in the day, I asked him how everything went, and I happened to mention his wife’s status update, simply because it had alarmed me—it sounded as if the interview didn’t go well at all.

He said, “Yeah, she’s been pretty down on Christ lately, and that really bothers me.”

OK.

You know me. Perhaps my honest response would have been, “Hey, maybe she’s on the right track!” And to launch into a discussion about the folly of blind faith and the rewards of self-reliance and open-minded inquiry. Something like that. But this was my friend, and he was struggling. He didn’t need a further challenge to his faith thrown in his face, on top of everything else his family was suffering. He had relied on religion his whole life, and now more than ever, he needed it to fall back on.

I wasn’t sure how to respond for a second, but finally I went for empathy and said, “Well, maybe after some time, in retrospect, she’ll feel differently.”

Inside, of course, I was mildly disappointed by the words coming out of my mouth, and I was regretting people’s reliance on an imaginary being, but outwardly, I had to be there for my friend. It was a fascinating moment. This guy is really the first close religious friend I’ve had, so I wasn’t exactly prepared for this kind of conversation.

I spoke to an essentially non-religious friend about it later, and he said, “Hmmm, that’s interesting. I wonder what it’s like to be in a house where faith crumbles for one of the partners. I mean, I fully understand people’s need for a God. It makes life a little easier if you’re always knowing that there’s a plan, or that someone is looking out for you. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s silly, but I still sometimes fall back on my upbringing and realize that part of me still believes in … something. I’ll admit to not understanding someone being a devout religious person, someone who prays and thinks God will solve everything, but the idea of having some faith … that I can understand simply because I’m sure it helps a lot of people sleep at night.”

What do you think? If you’re a non-religious person confronted by a friend who is deeply religious and, in one way or another, struggling with his or her faith … what do you do? Gently encourage your friend toward abandoning the faith (which, honestly, a part of me wanted to do)? Or try to speak his or her language in a comforting way, and therefore reinforce the religous foundation despite your inner objections?

And what about my “essentially” non-religious friend? I use quotes because there does seem a small part of this friend that is indeed religious. Something small and malnourished, but there. We’ll talk about that little seedling of faith—and its ability to provide a modicum of comfort—on another day …

The text reads:

“Note: Just to let you know it is not that we don’t believe in things like that, it is just misleading when you talk about it being billions of years old, when we all know that the world is only about 6,000 years old. So why would I pay so that you can misslead my children, your world is just a revolving(?), ours has a start and an end. God created the world. He created animals and man all in the same week. It was also Adam who named all the animals, they will do the essay ‘Rock and Minerals’ but it might not be 5 pages long, and about billions of years, it will be according to the Bible.”