Saturday, July 09, 2005

Philosophy professor

Here's part of an email I sent to my Philosophy professor, the good part is near the bottom (isn't is always?):

About the religious stuff: I was a child between religions. While I would not call myself an atheist, I'm purty dern close. I fit your statistic, and I can tell you why: When you are a child in the middle of competing religions you get to see the pettiness and hypocrisy of both. In my case, the Catholics thought of the Protestants as simpletons and the Protestants believed the Catholics were going to hell for worshipping false gods (mary) and for being worldly. They fought over me, for my immortal soul. It was as if I were the Holy Land.

If those desert people would suddenly see their religions as fiction, instantly they would look into the dirt and say, "I killed your children over this!?"

I think evangelical proselytizing has nothing to do with any god. It's a wolf in sheep's clothing. Enculturation. I'm reminded of an image I saw on Television:

A tall, white, lean woman with huge, pinkish, strange hair and thick, colorful makeup in a room full of African children standing on the dirt floor of a classroom. The children are not smiling, they are staring in disbelief at the circus that has come to town, but there is something else in their eyes. These children know want. They know hunger and violence. In the hand of every child (girl, boy, teenager, toddler) was a blond, white Barbie Doll wearing a dress remarkably like the one the lady with the pink hair is wearing, the lady who produced the toys from a cardboard box as she professed, tearfully, practiced, that these poor children don't know about Christmas and baby Jesus andthat that is why she has come to give them presents.

Now, I don't know many Christians who will claim that lady, but there she is nonetheless. Those children were an abstraction to her. If she were capable of seeing the suffering that their bodies suffer, she would interest herself less on their intangible souls adn more on their tangible bodies by going to her own country to convince her own people that there are those who need our help, and that the help should be intellegent and non-ideological.


Shazaam!!!

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