Religious Debates are Like Bear Claws
Sorry for holding off on this post for so long. With the end of the Orientation, coming to my new home, and meeting a bunch of new Korean teachers, I haven’t been able to keep up with what’s going around me.
Anyways, a continuation on my drunken anger.
I was having great fun with a bunch of buddies late at night after the bars, when I heard one of the orientation members touting Christianity. Being drunk and foolish, I started a conversation with him. I say conversation, not debate, because a debate requires logical conclusions made from hard evidence and assumptions that are at least plausible.
By the way, I am an atheist/agnostic. I fell away from Christianity relatively late in my life considering many young teens are turning away from Christianity in droves these days. I became a non-believer during the winter of 2004. That winter, the second largest earthquake to have ever been recorded on a seismograph created a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in 11 different countries around the Indian Ocean. After that, a guest pastor came to our church and held a sermon about the tsunami. One of the things he said was that the tsunami was actually a good thing because it opened the doors of Indonesia to Christian missionaries, who were previously not allowed to enter. That was the purpose of the Tsunami that killed so many people in an instant, and ruined the lives of countless others. WHAT!? I’m not going to lie, many of our church members were upset about that sermon, but it definitely opened up my eyes. What kind of God, whose supposed to love us and care for us, would let this atrocity happen?
I won’t ever go full atheist because there’s just too much we don’t know, and we are so completely small as a species on a planet within a system within a cluster within a galaxy within the universe that it’s just as idiotic close-minded to say there’s nothing going on that’s bigger than us as it is to be a hard core Christian that thinks that if you pray hard enough, Jesus will come to your aid.
Anyways, back to the Christianity conversation with D, the Christian. There was a lot of back and forth on the idea of God and justice. If God is just, why does he let good people die? Why does he let children die? Why does he put power into the hands of people who exclude large groups of people in favor of a select few? His answers were typical Christian answers. 1. The real reward is in heaven, so earthly suffering doesn’t matter. 2. We can’t understand God’s idea of justice because we’re mere humans and God’s justice trumps human justice.
BS - 1. There are great, morally just people who aren’t Christian, so their “real reward,” according to the bible is a lake of fire and lots of teeth gnashing (Does anybody know what that means? Gnashing of teeth? I’ve always wondered what that sounds like, or what gnashing actually means). 2. If we were made in God’s image, and he handed down ten commandments that explicitly stated a code of ethics, I’m pretty sure our idea of justice should pretty much be in line with God’s idea of what good and bad.
What ended the conversation, and what ultimately made it an anti-debate was his ending statement which went something like this: “Well I’m against trying to use logic as a means to understanding God, because faith is based on ‘illogia’.” Illogia, he said, is a doing away with logic and reason when it comes to ideas based on faith. This is something he learned at his Christain university.
First, shame on any institute of learning that touts such an asinine train of thought. A school of higher learning told you not to use reason? REALLY? DOES THAT MAKE SENSE? NO? WELL THAT’S OK, BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO USE LOGIC.
That is how he ended the argument! He said he can’t debate the topic because logic is being used! That’s like playing a friend in battleship, and after a horrible loss, where you haven’t sunk any of his ships and he destroyed all of yours, you find out that you had actually called out all the number/letter combos that should have sunk his ships. His defense? Well, I have a magic forcefield around all my ships, so none of your bombs actually hit the ships. I play by different rules, and you lost.
I know many Christians who are smart, logical, and overall good people. While I respect their way of thinking, this debate has swayed me more towards the darkside than any amount of Marilyn Manson, dancing, and whistling could ever do.
The REC
p.s. (in Eastern European Accent) Sorry for long post. In Mother Russia, we have saying: arguments are like bear claws, they are sharp and black and connected to large furry animal.
p.p.s. Another reason why I was really mad was because I was totally digging on this cute redhead, and when I got pulled into this conversation, another buddy swooped in and took over. “Nothing is worse than a religious cockblock,” says Sam.
