Universal Respect for Believers, Atheists

In her review of Stephen Hawking’s “A Life in Science,” (June 9) Bettyann Kevles writes of Hawkings and his wife: “Their marital problems, the biographers insist, grew largely from tension between her Christian orthodoxy and his slide from agnosticism to atheism.”

Is that slide as in downward ? One does not “slide” from agnosticism to atheism any more than one “slides” from Christianity to Judaism, or vice versa. Or from, let’s say, Methodism to Catholicism, or vice versa. To the mind of most atheists, I would think, the movement from agnosticism to atheism is a step upward.

Whether reviewers and the newspapers that publish them bow to today’s views of political correctness or just plain old-fashioned fairness, it should be done in a universal way.

If a newspaper has decided to go out of its way not to antagonize believers of any religion, then by the same token it should not antagonize those who reject all religion.

LOIS LYONS

Malibu