Life of Pi, again

The spouse was asking me why I didn't recommend one of my favorite novels, Life of Pi, to the presidential candidates. Well, I said, "Life of Pi" is more about personal belief -- the decisions every human being has to make about what they will believe about things they can't see or prove. That includes religious belief, but it's also about what kinds of things are possible in the world, kind of metaphysical questions. I don't think a president in particular needs to consider those questions any more than anyone else. They're important questions for everyone.
Not that the question of faith can't be a political question. It clearly is, and lately you can see it in a round of quasi-political books advocating atheism: Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything or Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. Those books (which, to be clear, I have read only reviews of) remind me of what "Life of Pi" says about atheists. Our hero young Pi -- who is so religious he embraces Hinduism, Christianity and Islam equally -- encounters his science teacher, Mr. Kumar, at the zoo. Admiring the animals, Mr. Kumar tells Pi he is an atheist:

"When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, 'Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?' God never came. It wasn't God who saved me -- it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us. One day we will take hold of the means of production and there will be justice on earth."
This was all a bit much for me. The tone was right -- loving and brave -- but the details seemed bleak. I said nothing.

A bit later, Pi reflects:

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.