I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is. — Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B.
One of the subtexts in Graham Greene’s novel, The End of the Affair, is whether there is a god and whether it even matters.
It is revealed at the end of the novel that the character Sarah, rather than being an atheist, was actually a Catholic. The proof: her mother, to going against the wishes of her spouse at the time, took two-year old Sarah to a priest and had her baptized as a Catholic. Imagine: tossing a young child into the world of the church because the mother wanted revenge on her husband. Bendrix later muses: “You can’t mark a two-year-old child for life with a bit of water and a prayer.”
Earlier Sarah’s mother had confessed: “I always had a wish that it would ‘take’. Like vaccination.” Now there’s a nice image: religion in a hypodermic needle.
A Celebration of Reading 