I have a lot of very emotional and heated debates with some people here at Ottawa University about religion. I think, because I come from a completely different spectrum of belief systems but still from a similar western-industrialized lifestyle, both sides, me and them, have a hard time even grasping the other persons ideals.
The first time ever I was exposed to a person that believed every word in the bible to be the plain truth (for sake of simplicity I will just refer to those views as creationist views) was several years ago, when a baseball player from New Mexico told me that dinosaur bones were buried in the ground by evil scientist. I was struck and couldn’t believe that a person actually could be this paranoid and uneducated while from a alleged educated country.
Here at OU I meet people with those believes deeply rooted in them every day. They are my close friends, and everything I do with them is absolutely normal. But at one point or another we come to points in our discussions where their and my believes shine through. It turns into a heated discussion that most times ends with both sides agreeing that the other person is a total idiot. That’s mostly what I was ever able to accomplish in these conversations.
While I try to pose questions that are absolutely logical, it just seems that logic doesn’t apply to a talk as soon as it is about god or religion to these friends of mine. Everything else (psychology of others, sports, some physics, some biology) is possible to be discussed on a very rational and logical basis.
I started to really try to see it from their point of view, but many arguments are just totally not working. They argue with me, that everything in the afterlife will be awesome for people who believe and that I will end up in eternal damnation for the lack of my believe. As soon as I then question how their god can be loving and do that to a perfectly fine human like me or other non-believers, they can’t really give me any satisfying explanation besides that “god’s ways are higher than ours.” So basically, they would argue with me to a certain point and as soon as a dead-end in their argumentation is reached, they pull out either the “faith” or “higher ways” card that is absolutely impossible to argue with.
I respect Christianity and religion in general. But when it comes to views that are dangerous because they imply not the ideals of loving thy neighbor or thy family or thy whoever, but rather “watch out for your own ass” and “the only love that counts is your love to god” or other imaginary friends, than I only see that ending badly.
The way they can justify these extremist views to themselves are through disregarding science and calling science “just books” when I call the bible “just a book.” It’s an absolutely frustratingly doubt-proof system that protects itself from three different ways of attack.
First it protects itself through claiming a bigger picture that’s not understandable for us. That would already be a nice enough way out of every discussion, but it would make all conversations a little too plain.
Secondly it protects through disregarding human accomplishments and findings that are not coherent with the bible as evil and just plain false/fake; without realizing that you really can’t disregard parts of science and still respect other parts – evolution is a religion has to be one of the top 5 stupidest things I have heard in my lifetime, Jesus riding dinosaurs being number 1 because of the awesome hilarity factor.
Thirdly, and most scaring, is the fact that if the first two explanations happen to fail to protect them from an incoherent/blasphemic view, fear takes over. Sometimes I hear, “I see where you are getting at, but I am scared that if I think about this further, I am going to have to go to hell.” I am not going to go into depth about how this is really messed up and controversial in so countless ways. After this statement a dropping of the whole subject will most certainly ensue because ignorance is a bliss that will still enable you to make it to heaven.
My favorite question right now: If god is almighty, can he make a stone that is so heavy, that even he can’t lift it? (Thanks to my godfather for this question – I don’t have a god, but do have a godfather, hooray) The replies I get are priceless and so perfectly following the three protection methods mentioned above.
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