Conversation with a Christian (Part 2)

Back again with the drunken ramblings of a cynical redneck and the deluded deacon who decided that he was a safe enough character to hold such a conversation with.  This section was a fair bit easier to edit than the previous. The conversation seemed to venture towards more personal things in the author’s life, which I found to be of no use.  To me, as an outsider looking in, it was a probing by the deacon to expel certain feelings from the author.  Very rarely was there actually anything worth listening to.  Certain things have been left in to set the scene or to prove a point, but one thing that I have gathered from my own deciphering and minor education in psychology is that both parties where trying there damndest to convince the other.  As calm as everything seemed to be, there were a lot of awkward silences and weird interruptions which I am sure, you as the reader picked up on from the earlier post.  We have tried to keep that to a minimum here but once again I believe it highlights the faults of our author, who, as I can contest to, is a good man with both faults and triumphs.  Here he was not at his best and as a personal friend and a professional I must point these things out for good or ill.

 

J: Ok, let’s take a step back and rely on belief.  Again just a blind…

D: But you do that when you turn the light switch on.

J: No, I know!

D: Can you explain how that would work?

J: Yes, I know exactly how that works.

D: But you don’t know how everything works that you do?

J: Well I don’t know how the power gets to this box out here.

D: Yeah, you don’t have to.

J: I don’t know how that fucking LED T.V. works.

D: And you, you know, you live with it anyway.  You trust it and go with it.  And, and at some point, at some point ok, you, you had this faith in evolution or something.  You can’t explain how those things all come together and really here’s the thing…

J: No.  No, there’s a lot I can’t, that’s why I say I don’t know.

D: Here’s the thing, my experience shows me, where do babies come from?  Living people who make babies.  And where do strawberries come from?  They come from living strawberries that make baby strawberries.  Everything that comes, everything that exists, comes from something else alive, unless it’s a rock or something like that, and so, so my experience, everything in my experience and everything that makes sense, shows me that living things come from other living things, and so if, human beings got life somehow, it makes sense to me, and it makes a lot more sense to me that, that human beings got life from another living thing which the bible says is god.  Um, I don’t see evolution, I don’t, I don’t see forward progress.  I don’t see, I don’t see that happening.  I see things degenerating, deteriorating.

J: There’s a book uh, I read for argument’s sake, that you might actually really, really enjoy called The Science of God.  I can’t remember who wrote it, but uh, check it out seriously.  It’s a hell of a good read.  I mean it totally, it’ll, I mean it’s a religious book; it’s made for people, for the argument of god, that there is a god but it also blends the science.  You know, people that have the tendency to argue the science facts against god.  It blends those in and lets you see how it correlate with creation or correlate with the flood or correlate with Noah living to be 870 years old you know, bones inside the earth, you know stuff like that, that correlates and it was a very, very, I found it very interesting to read and you might wanna check it out.

D: Well I might.  I, I know people, the guy who was with me the other night is very into that kind of thing.  You know creation uh, creation science and that kind of thing that, I honestly have never gotten all that interested in um, but uh, I can see some value in it.

J: You’ve never felt the need to step out of it for a few, I mean as a grown, conscious, I’m sure the teenage rebellion years you said earlier, you know that’s, I wasn’t conscious when I was a teenager.  I wasn’t conscious until just a couple years ago in all honesty.  Uh, but as a conscious adult, you ain’t never just wanted to step out of it and think on a total different plain, just for a little while, to see if maybe there was something else out there?  You ever smoke marijuana?

D: I haven’t.

J: You ever try, or wanted to?

D: No.  Nah I haven’t had any desire to do that.

J: Well that’s, that’s one thing that will open up your mind and make you think and uh, psychedelics are another thing.  Mushrooms, you know, and I recommend organic stuff.  I mean there’s nothing wrong with marijuana or psilocybin mushrooms…(inaudible) I can even back it up with Leviticus and Timothy and your, you know, seed bearing buds you should, you know, treat them as meats and eat all you can.  I mean it says that in the bible.

D: I don’t know.  That’s uh, to me that’s messing with your mind.  Making your mind…

J: How do you know god didn’t put that there so you could experience that and you might be able to become closer?  I’ve heard people of uh, there’s you know, the tribes in Brazil that have Ayahuasca ceremonies and they honestly believe that that’s how they get closer to god.  That they can see god face to face and they can do it once a year and their whole fucking year is trouble free because they know god.  I mean they know for a fact, it ain’t like your faith, I mean these people have seen god.

D: I honestly believe they are going to hell.  I honestly believe they probably, no telling what kind of lives they live but I don’t think they lived civilized lives.  I don’t think they are very educated.  I don’t think they have a good life.

J: But the, they’re native.  I mean they’re pretty much some of the only cultures that hadn’t been touched by eastern or western civilization.  They live the same…

D: They need to be.  They’re savages.  They’re going to hell.

J: But why do “savages” go to hell?  People that lived that way…

D: Ok, why do savages go to hell?

J: We’re not talking about scalping and eating babies and shit.

D: That’s what they do though.

J: Not all of them.

D: But follow me, follow me though.  You got Adam and Eve.  They’re civilized.  Far as we know they’re civilized.  You got Cain and Able, they’re pretty much civilized.  They offer sacrifices as good as you can do.  They, they herd cattle and grow crops.  Couple generations down Cain’s line you got people who pull away and start doing their own thing.  This guy marries two women.  First case of polygamy…

J: Do you not, hold on one minute.  Do you not believe that there was any type of tribes or any type of humanoid type of people before Adam and Eve?

D: There’s no reason to believe that.  Um, I don’t see any real need for them or evidence of them.

J: Cro-Magnon man or Adam and Eve were shaped a lot like Cro-Magnon man or the, the Neanderthal?

D: Yeah, I mean there’s Neanderthals walking around today.  There’s people that look like…

J: Mongoloids and shit?

D: There’s people that look like that now.  There’s no difference.  So what you have is people who start civilized and some pull away and start doing their own thing and they get uncivilized and they become savage.  You, I don’t know if you’ve ever read Lord of the Flies in high school…

J: Loved it.  Loved it and that’s exactly…

D: That’s what happens.  And that’s, and that’s where cavemen come from and that’s where um, savages in South America come from.

J: So you honestly believe that at one point in time everybody lived civilly?  Say even a, even a small community of we’ll say six hundred people, they all lived civilly and then just like one or two of them decided to branch off, they started breeding, well there would have to be more than one or two, say ten or twelve, walked three hundred miles this way and branched off and started doing other shit, we’re gonna live off different plants and we’re gonna eat different animals and we’re gonna do different things?

D: It, it was probably moral stuff more than anything.  Like one guy says, “Ok, you know everybody takes one wife.  I’m gonna take two.  I’m gonna do things my way.”  And he starts, he says this, he says uh, “There’s a guy who tried to steal from me, so I broke his neck.”  You know.  And they just start living uh, that way.

J: The outlaw type lifestyle?

D: Yeah, they started living by the law of the jungle.

J: And that created cavemen because they were eager to live like chaos, I mean live under no rules?

D: Yeah, that’s what I think.

J: Eh, I find that, I don’t know.  So you don’t believe in carbon dating or any kind of, any of that stuff like that?

D: I don’t, I don’t really trust it.  Of course, I’m not gonna say I really understand it.

J: Well I mean I don’t understand it.  I’m not a scientist.  See that’s some of that other shit you have to take; you know, you just have to take other people’s word for it. 

D: It doesn’t really matter to me if the earth was…

J: Ok, what about the whole dinosaur thing?  Did we live with dinosaurs?  I mean, were there fucking eighty foot tall dinosaurs running around with us being six feet tall?

D: There’s not much, the only little hint of them in the bible is the, like in the book of Job, there’s records of this critter called um, Leviathan.

J: You’re, as a person, as a whole, I mean you dress nice, you got a little money…What do you do for a job?  The church doesn’t pay you, does it?

D: Yeah that’s it.  That’s my, that’s my only…

J:  Ahh, see I don’t agree with that.  You think you make more than uh, 90% of your congregation?

D: Um, not 90%.

J: Uh, a majority of your congregation?

D: I don’t know.  I don’t know what they make.  They, they set up a salary package and they call the pastor and I got what they gave me.

J: Do ya’ll force tithings or what?

D: No.

J: No admission fees, nothing like that?

D: No, just like in this other Baptist church you were baptized in.

J: Pass the bowl around and you can put your dollar in or your change in?

D: Yeah, there’s an offering plate that’s passed.  That’s pretty much traditional in most churches, but most people who support the church uh, give, you know, they give and offering with the Sunday School uh, envelope.  And they support it regularly.  Just something they believe in.

J: I don’t know.  It just, I just think religion is one of them old world beliefs that we got hung up in, we took a, you know, we just took it, took too much stock in it.

D: Have you ever been married?

J: Nah.  I don’t believe in marriage.

D: Kids?

J: I don’t believe in having kids either.

D: Huh!?

J: I think the uh, earth is way over populated.  We have a system of absolutely corrupt greedheads that, if they would just allow it to happen, we could feed everybody in this fucking world.  Nobody would be homeless, but they won’t allow it to happen.  And I think it’s easier to kill off the population than it would be to change, get these mother fuckers to change their mind.  So adding kids to it doesn’t help the situation.

D: So you got uh, girlfriend that lives with you?

J: Yes sir.

D: Does she uh, have this same kinda philosophy you do?

J: Uh, she’s uh, I hate to talk about her this way, she’s just one of them, “I don’t think about it or I don’t really care.”  I think it, to me I think it’s important to, I got this agenda that, for one, I’ve got a lot of character flaws and I wanna make myself a better person.  I’m working on that a lot of, through a lot of different ways.  Religion is not one of them because I disagree.  Uh, but I, all I think, I think all it takes is consciousness.  Just being aware of yourself, your actions, your words, your impact on the people around you.  That’s, I think that’s all that matters.  That’s the utmost.  You are responsible.  You are your own god, you are responsible for, I mean for the actions…

D: Would you, so are you willing to spell out some of those character flaws?

J: Oh yeah, like I said earlier, I’m judgmental.  I’m judgmental like a motherfucker.  I will, in the first five, ten, fifteen seconds of meeting somebody, I’ve already picked out three or four flaws that, I think it’s so I can use it in defense later on.

D: But you are agreeing with Jesus.  He said don’t judge.  He said don’t judge so you won’t be judged.  So you’re agreeing with Jesus.

J: Oh yeah!  Yeah.  I’m not saying that there’s nothing in that book that is not morally sound.  I think that there are, now there are, there’s a lot of shit in Leviticus,  I’m for gays, uh, I’m a libertarian, anything you can do for yourself that causes pleasure or that you like that does not harm anybody else, fucking go for it.

D: The bible says it’s a sin, but it also says judge, being judgmental is a sin.  And you don’t think, you don’t think, you agree that being judgmental is a sin, only you probably don’t call it sin, but you don’t agree that homosexuality is?

J: No, no you’re right.  I don’t have to agree with the rules in that book.  I can make up my own.

D: Could you do that on the street with your car?

J: I do.

D: Just make up your own traffic laws?

J: I do.  Now whether I get away with it or not is another question.

D: What if you make up your own traffic laws and you kill somebody?

J: Then that’s my responsibility and that’s on me.

D: What if everybody did that?  What if everybody made up their own traffic laws?

J: Are we still having the same justice system that we have now or is there just no laws at all?

D: Well I don’t know, uh…

J: I believe that there does have to be a hierarchy of some sort.  I mean the mass of the population cannot take care of themselves.

D: The simple answer is, if we all, and, and that’s the way it started out.  They made those traffic laws because people were bumping into each other.  Um, but there’s gotta be, you know, some standard to live by, some standards of right and wrong, morality, and really the best that’s ever been done is Christianity.  Um…

J: Do you need a book to tell you what’s right and wrong?  Yes or no?

D: You need the bible.  You need…

J: You need a book!  See like this is, do you think smoking pot is a sin?

D: Yeah, I think it’s a form of drunkenness.  The bible doesn’t talk about smoking pot.

J: It talks about, I mean, it talks about to treat the buds as meats, to uh, enjoy, you know.

D: It’s not talking about marijuana anywhere in there.

J: Any kind of seed bearing bud and I mean that’s, that’s plain as fucking day.

D: It’s talking about, but that’s talking about food that you eat.  You’re really stretching it to justify using that verse.

J: See, I think that’s what a lot of people do.  I even, I wrote a short story I think you would like called uh, Death of a Christian.  You want me to print you off a copy right quick?

D: Sure.

J: It’s about uh, a guy that’s down on his luck, real you know, I’ll just let you read it, but I’ll get it up here just a minute.  Uh, it’s all up to interpretation.  But marijuana uh, I think if you do something wrong, anxiety, guilt and fear, is your body’s natural reaction to, “Hey, you fucked up!  You did something wrong!”

D: Guilt is a thing that god has, I believe, put in to us.  Guilt is all through the bible.  Guilt is your body, your, your life’s way of saying, “Um, uh, I shouldn’t have done that and I need to do something to rectify that.”

J: But it doesn’t have to necessarily have anything to do with god though.

D: But I think that you know that god’s out there.  I think uh, I think Psalm 19 uh, says, “The… (inaudible over key tapping)…declaring the glory of god.”  And Romans 1 says, “God has made himself known to everybody and everybody knows he’s there.  Some try and deny it but everybody knows it’s there.”  He, he makes himself known through your conscience.  He makes himself know through creation.  Um and he makes himself known, you see what he has created and your conscience tells you some things are right and some things are wrong.  And then some little short guy comes knocking on your door saying god wants you to take him seriously James.  And this is all three; you go this trifecta aiming at you, giving you a chance James.

J: But why?  Why does it have to be this ethereal fucking being that is out there shaking his finger at me from a million years ago?

D: I’m, I’m looking at evidence.  I don’t see as much logic as you seem to think you got.  I’m seeing a lot of leaps and bounds and a lot of things that you…

J: Yeah maybe about the weed shit and stuff like that, but…

D: There’s a lot of, there, you know you’re not giving me uh, a logical, rational, coherent system.  You got a lot of bits and pieces of things that you’re kind of, I think, throwing out there to kind of justify being uh, the kind of rebellious, kind of character that you’re portraying here, but I think you kind of know in your heart um, I’m sure of it and I don’t know, I’m not here to give you any grief, I’m here to try and be your friend and let you know if I can help you in anyway.  That’s what I’m in the neighborhood for.  Um, that’s why I knock on doors and once in a while, very rarely does anybody engage me on this level, most of the time they are just busy with life and they say, “Thanks a lot, maybe I’ll come.”  And that’s it.  Um, but if you, if you claim to be open minded and open to, you say you wanna work on your character flaws, um, I don’t know how you could go wrong just giving that a try.  And you know that I’m not gonna hurt you.  You could just come and listen.  Uh, I do bible study and, I mean that’s what I do on Sunday mornings.  I take a passage and I just walk through it.  Here’s, here’s what it says, here’s what it means, and here’s what I believe god intends for us to do with it so we can have abundant life, you know.  A good life you know.  Um, abundant life is…

 

J: What if I tell you I truly don’t need a god to uh, you know, fix my flaws?  I don’t need a god to, I can work myself through it.  I’ve, I’ve done good up to this point.  Trust me, if you would have seen me three years ago you would have been like, “Look at this fucking idiot!”  You know.

D:  Well I guess that’s, you know that’s just the best I can do.  I think, I think we, we don’t have the capacity to rally fix ourselves.  We don’t have the strength.  It’s like living in a…

J: I think we do.

D: …swimming in a fish bowl.  You’re inside the bowl, you can’t do anything about it.  You need outside help.  You need god’s…

J: I think we can do it.  If we honestly have the willpower and the want to do it, I mean look at what man has done.  Men can do amazing things and they’ve done it without god.

 

                I realized that the last post might have run a little long, maybe turning some people off.  I have kept this one a tad bit shorter although it was much harder to find a solid breaking point.  The next one should be the last as I am sure the few that are reading will be grateful.  I know I definitely will.  It can sometimes be a very demanding situation working for such an addled genius, but who am I to bitch.

Seeing shadows,

Stockton Riggs