Chewin in the Chung

Johnny Atomic sent me this E-mail:

My Friend,

I was going to post this on your blog but I was afraid you would take it as a serious attack. I am curious about the same thing Aaron asked you about. Your nearly insensate hate of Brother Jim (thanks for the correction) and other unfortunates like him.

While ¡§Brother Jim¡¨ was a drooling hate monger, he was pretty obviously also mentally challenged. I always thought it was odd that you were so offended by a 'tard like him. We kind of rate ourselves by the strength of our enemies, don't you think? You are willing to fight against near-death odds with a dozen angry assailants and bear them no ill will (if any live) afterward, but you couldn't even bear the thought of that Down Syndrome "evangelist". You might as well hate someone with Tourettes.

Curiously you have never attacked me for my Christianity though you have known since the late 90's. You've accepted my obvious flaws (both moral as well as social) and never accused me of hypocrisy or ignorance. Why the leniency where I am concerned? Or is it simply that I feel no need to chip at your Agnosticism so I am spared your wrath?

You have such a strong moral and ethical heart. You could probably bring others to your way of thinking given no more than your natural persuasion and charisma. But you lash out at, and criticize only the most pathetic examples of misplaced religious fervor. Even other agnostics think its weird.

Do you think for a moment I agree with the fear monger who wrote that disgusting "Dick and Jane" thing? How could I attend church or let my daughter play with the children of some psycho who wants to abuse people with terror? No one buys the idea that the author is a well-adjusted person. You are preaching to the choir.

If the situation were reversed and I was the smart one I would probably say something like "If you only attack the feeble, your arguments must not hold up to very vigorous resistance or You are afraid of the possibility that there is a valid opposing view¡¨ The third option (logically speaking) is that you are simply an emotional bully, but I have known you more than long enough to rule that out. You must see that hating a religion based on an individual or group of individuals is like hating a black man you are having lunch with at a business meeting because you had to drive through a ghetto once when you were a kid and you didn¡¦t like it. It¡¦s almost like another form of bigotry (I don¡¦t know if that makes any sense).

Anyway, this isn't an attempt to judge you. As I mentioned before I have the utmost respect for your moral and ethical strength. I always thought your Christian bashing was something you might leave behind one day. It just seems to make you unhappy.

Just some crude dime store philosophy to chew on. If anything I brought up pisses you off then I'm an idiot; just assume you took it the wrong way.

Johnny

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It took me two weeks to reply. I've known Johnny for 22 years, and I respect both his faith and his person. My response follows- the Tom I refer to is a mutual friend of ours who died in 1998.

Johnny,

First, {Some business stuff he has been helping me with}.

Now, I will try to respond to our theological issue. This answer has been some time in composing, so I hope I can effectively get it out of my head and into this E-mail.

First, the term 'insensate hate', while appropriately describing a 19 year-old Karl throwing Coke on a raving evangelist, does not really describe the kind of things I post on the blog now. And I of course would not assault anyone in such a way these days. So, having objected to 'insensate hate', I offer an alternative- "sensate distaste". I linked to the Dick and Jane site because I thought it begged for a parody, my only pejorative being the word 'goofy'.

So, am I attacking the feeble because I am afraid of a valid opposing view? In an ultimate sense, we cannot have opposing views. And here is where my explanation gets long (and possibly boring):

Sometime in the late eighties I was at Tom's house and we were discussing metaphysics/theology and whatever. Tom went off on one of his long speals and I responded with a question: "Can God make the sum of the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle equal something other than 180 degrees?" Tom said: "Karl, God can make the sum of the angles of a Euclidean triangle equal to purple. How can you even imagine that a God who transcends space and time would be bound by human rationality?" Now on one level this was just me being pretentiously flippant and Tom trumping me in pretentiousness, which is as it should be. But on another level we were talking about a hardcore philosophical problem that leaves young Catholic priests awake at night: Is God bound by reason? I concluded years later that Tom was right, but that the implications of this premise are so radical that few will accept them.

If God transcends reason, then all bets are off. Islam and Buddhism can both be true, at the same time, even where they contradict each other. Jesus can be both God's son, and only a prophet, and a regular guy. God himself can simultaneously exist and not exist. Therefore, all religious truths must be subjective. The closest religious tradition to this in the United States are the Unitarian Universalists, though I do not know the historical development of their beliefs.

This is one of the factors that has made me so comfortable in Asia all these years. Chinese people understand, at a fundamental cultural level, that there is no argument between the man who worships one god and the man who worships ten. There is little evangelism here of any type- the Buddha walked the world 500 years before Christ, but local Buddhists would never think of trying to proselytize Christians (or Muslims or anyone else, really). The Mormons that Aaron referred to in the blog comments come here and avidly try to convert the locals, but even when Taiwanese people accept the Mormon faith, they are much slower to pick up this idea that every Mormon has a duty to convert the rest of the world to Mormonism. (This causes some consternation among the young Mormon evangelicals that get sent over here).

And this takes us to my problems with Christianity. It is one of the disadvantages of Christians to be cultural descendents of those who conceived both Monotheism and Aristotelian logic: One God. One Truth. Yes or no, right or wrong. And believing that the bible is 'true' in the same way that a proposition of mathematics is 'true' necessarily leads to the attempted imposition of the faith in all aspects of life. Schools. The Federal Government. Universal Proselytizing.

So I think this explains why I would never attack you for your Christianity. Your expressions of faith seem to me to reflect your personal relationship with God, not a dogma that all those who disagree with you are wrong and doomed to hell.

I think this is enough for now. Can I put your original E-mail and this answer on the blog?

Karl