From my appreciation of a friend, reader, and one of my favorite email correspondents/sparring partners, Ray Balestri, RIP. “But since Ray was a talented lawyer who quarreled with people for a living, we enjoyed arguing about everything from music (he was for Steely Dan, I’m against Steely Dan — I once told him ‘Rikki Don’t Lose that Number’ makes me want to drown a kitten, and then myself’) to the existence of God. I’m for God, he was against God. Even if he grew up religious and knew the Bible better than most Baptist preachers. In fact, Ray once told me that in high school, he was in a Christian rock band that played Jesus Christ Superstar covers, meaning it was a small miracle he’d merely become an atheist, and not a Satanist. But he was still my favorite kind of atheist, the kind who deeply enjoyed sparring, but who wasn’t so arrogant that he couldn’t write: ‘I'm prepared to accept the possibility that the God I do not believe in might be stronger than my disbelief. I would add a corollary to that: Any God worth his salt would be incomprehensible to me.’”