David McElroy

For the last couple of days, I’ve had an intense desire to return to a restaurant where I haven’t eaten in years.

Cosmo’s Pizza was one of my two favorite pizza places in Birmingham for many years. (Salvatore’s is the other.) A political client first took me there in the early 1990s and it quickly became a place that I would visit over and over — with many different people.

It was in the heart of Birmingham’s artsy Five Points South area. It was eclectic. The crowd could be strange. There was energy and weirdness in the air. I loved it.

Cosmo’s closed permanently in 2016, so it’s been a decade. But over the weekend, I found myself intensely craving the experience of being there.

I was craving the pizza, but I was craving the atmosphere even more. And after thinking about it for a couple of days, I’ve realized I was craving something else. I was craving some of the experiences I’ve had there — and it finally hit me that I was craving something about the people I’ve taken there, too.

This felt like more than simple nostalgia, though. I had the odd feeling that something in me felt like returning to the past to finish some unfinished emotional business. Every woman I dated for years went to Cosmo’s at least once — and some went there many times with me.

As I tried to get to sleep in the wee hours of Sunday night, I puzzled over what I was feeling. And it suddenly hit me that there was something I needed to say — to women I’ll never even talk with again.

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When I answered my phone, the young man told me his name, but not much else. I was still trying to figure out why he had called when he suddenly blurted out his disagreement with me.

“What you said doesn’t prove God!” he said with certainty.

I suddenly realized this man had gone to the trouble of finding my phone number and calling just to tell me how wrong I had been about something I’d written.

I rarely write overtly about religion or theology, but I’ve said a lot recently that’s required me to refer to elements of my faith more than usual. Something I’d written had annoyed this man.

At first, I thought he was an angry atheist calling to challenge my non-rational belief in my creator. I still wasn’t clear about what I had written to annoy him, but I explained that he seemed to misunderstand my intent.

“If you think I’m trying to prove anything, you’ve mistaken me for something I’m not,” I told him. “I’m just reporting what I’ve experienced. What you believe is up to you.”

That’s when he surprised me.

It turned out he was an angry theist, not an angry atheist. He was annoyed with me because I hadn’t cited the apologetic argument and the “proof text” that he had been taught.

He told me I shouldn’t talk about my own subjective spiritual experience. He felt certain that it was a waste of time to talk about love and silence and “fuzzy emotions” about hate and forgiveness.

I responded as gently as I could.

“Have you ever actually read the Sermon on the Mount?” I asked.

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This is how a lot of today’s Internet is created. Since this is a growing concern, let’s talk about that briefly.

I started writing professionally as a minimum-wage part-timer at a newspaper when I was a freshman in college. The video terminals on which we typed our news stories were barely smart enough to retain what we wrote. The idea that a machine could make up articles of its own would have seemed like pure science fiction to us.

I’ve been paid quite nicely for my writing over the years. I was first paid poorly as a newspaper writer and editor (and eventually publisher). I was paid far better for the ridiculous spin that I wrote when I was a political consultant. And I’ve been working for myself — for free — on this website for the past 15 years.

But I want to be clear about this. The idea that I would need a machine to write for me after all these years is actually offensive to me. Whether you like my writing or not, it’s my writing. My words. My style. My ideas. Keep Reading