Douglas Adams, who I wrote about the other day, is a radical atheist. Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game, recently came out as being homophobic. How do you deal with an author you like who has a belief conflicting to yours?
The easy answer is to focus on not the author, but their work. I don't think that Ender Wiggin ever beat up a gay kid at Battle School (I don't know, I haven't read the series). Jesus and God come up once each in the first Hitchhiker's book, but neither are completely atheistic. The first is when it says "nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change". It's not exactly promoting Christianity, but it isn't calling Jesus a sham either. When the Babel fish, which translates for you, is being discussed, a story is mentioned in which due to the Babel fish, it is proof that God exists, and coincidentally he does not. However, the next sentence is "Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys."
If an author does happen to mention something that you personally disagree with in their writing, it becomes your choice as to whether you should continue reading or if you are simply going to disagree with him/her (although both the examples mentioned are he) and keep going.
Before social media and 24/7 news, we didn't know everything about everyone who had 15 minutes of fame, and we probably read lots of books by authors whose beliefs we did not share. I recently found out I sure don't believe George Bernard Shaw's idea that we all are evolving into gods.
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