Witness

I always walk past the free speech zone on my way to class. It's more of a curse than anything but I don't really feel like making a circumference around my classroom building in order to avoid a dozen fliers shoved under my nose, a sacrifice that must be made in the interest of time. Need less to say I am a complete master of avoidance, having done the job of passing propaganda myself plenty of times, I know how to look uninterested. On rare occasions, I stop and listen.

On such a recent occasion, I passed by a man surrounded by people and a few microphones punctuating a semicircle. I stopped and listened. I saw the book in his hand, the arrogance in his face and knew his purpose and message far before the first words struck my ear.

It wasn't the usual hell-fire and damnation. He had to have been a campus minister. Their PR tactics are more crowd friendly. He had been arguing with people in the crowd about religion but, by the time I arrived, he took an intermission for the university students to declare for themselves the difference Christ had made in their lives. The students parade themselves to the front of the semicircle, holding cardboard signs, one side reflecting a former existence and the opposite declaring a counter existence. I was on drugs. Now I'm high on Jesus. Cliche. My only thoughts were you don't need god for this. You don't need an invisible deity who's only spoken through a book from the bronze age to validate your existence.

I found myself glad to freed from the trap that there was something inherently wrong with me that the only way to fix it was to telepathically communicate with an almighty sky god and to deny myself this that and the other. I can value and accept myself from within myself, not without. Not through other people. Not through a god. I think it was this sign that stood out to me the most and contrasted so deeply within me. She claimed that she was looking for other people's approval but now she has the approval of god. But what of herself? Does she like herself, accept herself for who she is?

The speaker kept asking if any of those people's witness spoke out to us. So this was his tactic. Rather than trying to reason, he would appeal to emotions, to people hurts and sorrows, their sense of worth and self-being.

He resumed debating after a time. His biggest issue was the idea of personal morality. Morality is based on culture, what is in the best benefit of the culture and the survival of our species. He brought up Hitler and genocide and I couldn't help myself.

"If you want to talk about genocide, look at all the people god in the Bible killed!"

He turned and looked at me, smirking, and asked what I had said.

"Look at all the people god killed in the bible-"

He began talking again ("god killed them for their wickedness!") and turned away.

"LET ME FINISH!" My pet-peeve is being interrupted.

He turned back, surprise, an arrogant smile sliding into place, "I thought you were done."

"You will know when I'm done when I stop talking." I felt like a bad-ass, a stone cold bitch. I'm not very outspoken normally. "God commanded the Hebrews to kill all of the people in the 'promise land' simply because they didn't believe in the same god."

"No he didn't!"

Are you fucking kidding me? Me and another guy shouted at him to look it up in Joshua but he had already finished with us. He didn't want to deal with the vicious god of the Old Testament, only the soft and gentle Jesus of modern American Christianity. As a Christian, I had always wondered about this strange dichotomy between the god of the bible, Jesus of the New Testament and the Christian religion so prevalent in our society. The focus was so much on what Jesus could do for you. Jesus came into my life and ever thing is fucking peachy. I've read the entirety of the bible several times and the focus always seemed to be more on giving up for god. Give up your time, your money, your bodily desires, and your entire life for god. Sure, you'll get something back. Heaven mainly, but also peace, joy, discernment, and a whole harvest of intangibles. What I read in the Bible was about life being a struggle and what I heard from pastors and followers alike was about the shit Jesus would do for us.

At least when the other guys come to campus, the ones who tell everyone they're going to hell for some trivial thing or another, they're being true to religion.

No Title

I am horrible at naming things. This blog for example has a horrible name. The title is horrible, the url is horrible. I am a horrible namer and I should not be the person to name my children.

I haven't been very inspired to write lately. I go through periods of total mental exhaustion where I do nothing but vegetate. I don't cook, I don't clean, and I don't think more than I have to.

In relation to thought, I find that I am more of a right brained individual. Language, history, music, art are my domain; math makes me cry like a little baby. That isn't to say that I can't do math at all. I scraped an A in my statistics class last semester but it was a miserable ordeal. All of this makes me a poor participant in a debate. I know the basics of philosophy and logic, how to construct an argument and how to criticize one but it is far from enjoyable. Atheist often are given this image of the strong analytical type, ready to debate, well versed in philosophy and logic. That image does not apply here. I'm not stupid. I'm actually pretty well educated. Science is understandable but boring. So I think it's not a lack of knowledge but more of a lack of motivation. I'd much rather engage in a conversation than a debate. The key difference is the goal. In a debate, the goal is to win, to come out on top, prove the other person wrong. With a discussion, the goal is to understand. I enjoy sharing different points of view and even challenge those points of view, requesting further explanation or the reasoning behind it. I think this is a far less aggressive approach than a debate.

As atheist, if we want people to listen to us, I think we need to be willing to listen ourselves. We don't have to agree with the other person but we do need to give them a chance to speak. However, I think this would only be effective in a one on one situation. On a larger scale, with people who are outright against everything we are and who's goal is rid the earth of doubters, this tactic will not work. But if I am just talking to someone I meet on the street, I don't have a reason to be defensive but I can still challenge that person to examine what they believe and why and in turn they can challenge my own beliefs or lack thereof. We don't have to get everyone to agree but if we can get people to understand why we are the way we are, religious or not, I think we have a better chance at breaking down all the intolerance between different modes of thought.

This probably didn't make a bit of sense.