Praying on Grief
We had a visit from evangelists this morning. Typically, I receive them with good humor. I respect the right of people to be wrong, if not the actual willingness to remain wrong in the face of compelling evidence, and a cheerful face is more likely than righteous atheistic fury to shiver someone’s shield of faith. Besides, I enjoy a good argument. Evangelists rarely put up much of a fight—my hypothesis is that anyone equipped with even the basics of reasoned argument wouldn’t be evangelists in the first place—but compelling them to admit that they’re arguing from faith after all, and not common sense, is good mental exercise.
Today was a little different, however. The opening line, before introductions even, was whether I believed “the Bible contains words which might provide comfort after the death of a loved one.” I had to agree: some people undoubtedly have found comfort from biblical teachings in their grief. Some people have also found comfort in the belief that their loved ones were whisked away by aliens in flying saucers, or that their loved ones miraculously escaped an exploding building and chose to go into hiding for unspecified reasons rather than speaking to authorities or their surviving family, or that their loved ones are still alive despite seeing the corpse, so I wouldn’t take that as much of an endorsement of biblical doctrine, but I digress.
The opening question was something of a fishing expedition: usually, it’s somewhat irrelevant, but every so often, the evangelists will ring the doorbell of someone who has lost friends or family recently, preferably (for the evangelist) recently enough to still be deep in the grieving process, offering a chance for the believers to exploit the emotionally vulnerable, to push their message of obedience to the Invisible Man in the Sky on someone who is in no state to think straight. That’s playing dirty. I’d be mildly offended at such tactics in the best of circumstances.
As it happens, however, I’m currently in that segment of the population who has recently lost friends or family: my brother died in May at the age of 37. And the attempt to exploit my loss to spread superstition got my hackles up. Instead of playing defense and settling for holding atheism up as a perfectly reasonable doctrine, I went right for the throat. I pinned our visitors into a definition of cruelty, and demonstrated a presumed God’s behavior fit that definition (Without even needing to get into the Midianites!), although the evangelists didn’t quite see how satisfying the definition means then that God, if he exists at all, is cruel. I drove them back into admitting that they believe the bible because they believe the bible—that exact phrase—although they wouldn’t admit the argument is circular. I called on the junior member of the pair, a girl who couldn’t have been more than 16, to answer a few questions herself, without her grandmother’s well-worn answers to fill in.
…and suddenly the meeting was over. Good-bye, thanks so much for your time.
When youth are brought along on evangelistic tours, they are there to learn. That is, they are there to learn how to convert the unbeliever, AND NOTHING ELSE. Any other form of learning, or even answering questions for themselves, is not to be tolerated. It’s dangerous. Which should tell you something about just how self-evident evangelists actually feel their self-evident truths are.