Chapter Twenty: Life with the Evangelists

I heard a lot about the bible while I was there. My aunt is the Christian conversion pusher of the family. Before she became totally dedicated to the Christian way she had a vision of the Angel Gabriel descending from the ceiling of her home. After that she started to wear a monks gettup complete with sandals and a white rope to close the hooded robe at the waist. God was interjected into every sentence she spoke, a really annoying development for my atheist father. That's when a decades long rift developed during which they hardly spoke. Visits to their house were frequent until then. Now I was living under her roof twenty years later.





I never did feel comfortable and at home during my stay. Part of the reason was because I was living the life of a veritable hermit for a couple of years. I had always been sort of a loner, my life alone and in my car solidified this personal characteristic of mine. But my Evangelist relatives were truly living in a very small world of their own theistic making. I had to be guarded in my conversation with them, constantly sensitive to their rather narrow points of view. This didn't come naturally to me, I have always enjoyed being conversationally provocative. I'd quote Ghandi, only to find out that he burns in hell for failing to convert to Christianity. Forget quoting Buddha; he was the son of the devil. As a matter of ridiculous self delusion, I found out that most everybody who walks the Earth is condemned to hell, along with their heathen ancestors. Factually based conjecture with those whose beliefs are based upon faith based delusions is impossible. They very well could be right, from the basis of the Evangelical ideal. It could be that there is only one way to look at God, and the only references to the words of God might only be found in the Bible. But then again, such narrowly focused, faith based assumptions have caused people to fly jet liners in to the sides of buildings under the crazed belief that such actions would be approved by God. We live in a world community. That is an inescapable reality. Beliefs that only certain blind men can see the unseeable and decree hell upon others who don't share their point of view can only lead to acts of pure evil. History will teach you that, if you strive for as much objectivity that you can manage with an open and loving heart. No wonder so many tribal Arabs hate us on the other side of the world. I'm sure they don't appreciate our armies of the west invading their lands and looting their resources; killing thousands of women and children and loved ones in the process, only to hear from our own fundamentalists that their beloved ancestors rot in hell for not praising Jesus. I think all this self righteous war mongering is enough to make the living Jesus cry or curse, one or the other or both.

It didn't take me too long to share these ideas with my relatives. Needless to say, my opinions didn't go over too well. It was like rustling leaves off a shaky tree; it wasn't hard at all to stir up an argument. Some people might think this stupidly rude of me to do, after all I was under their roof and at their mercy. But I wasn't going to lie to them or put on some kind of disingenuous show of repent or spiritual rebirth. That would've been disrespectful of them as human beings. I wouldn't con them for the sake of room and food. I shared my feelings on religion and spirituality with them over the course of a few conversations, then turned off the conjecture spigot once it became obvious that cool headed objectivity wasn't there thing. It seemed that the most controversial idea I shared was the one about how I never think about heaven or hell. This seemed anathemic to life for those who live to die. I explained that I thought the key to humanities salvation is loving compassion. How could you ever be sure that your responding to others out of love when your actions are based upon a fear of hell or a lust for heaven? That really threw my aunt for a loop. She read her bible through the night contemplating that one, then came back the next day with "Fear hell, lust for heaven!" I didn't say anything more. That mode of thinking just isn't my thing, and I didn't want to shed any more rain on her parade path to heavens gate.