Religious Debates in Weird Places: Wal-Mart

It started out as a rough day. I woke up with a headache after another night of not sleeping well due to Trillian (and now Scott too) being sick. After Scott and Atom headed off to work and school, I headed out with Trillian to show the rental house at 9am. I had 4 people scheduled to come, (only 2 showed up) but only one seemed interested. I hope she gets back to me with her application. After that, I decided to drive out to Scott's work to get some medicine that had been accidentally left in Scott's car after our trip to Gainesville over the weekend. Happily, Trillian napped in the car through all of this. At about 10:30 after I finished picking the medicine up from Scott, I decided to stop at Wal-Mart on the way back, to do some shopping and kill some time before I had to go get Atom at noon.

So, I'm walking around Wal-Mart. Trillian is awake in her car seat in the shopping cart and she's being very good; just calm and looking around at everything. I was reading the label on some hot chocolate mix, when an older, grandfatherly man in a grey suit approaches and starts talking to Trillian and telling me how cute she is and how much he likes babies. He says he likes their expressions at this age. I smile and nod and look down again at my box of hot chocolate, the way one does when complete strangers are getting a little too close to your baby. "Let me ask you something. Are you a Christian lady?" he says, clearly expecting me to say yes. I shake my head no, and try my best not to look apologetic about it, since I get the impression he intended to tell me some Christian related anecdote or something, and this is plainly not the answer I was supposed to give. He then asks if he can tell me about Jesus. I say that I don't have a lot of time to listen right now. He apparently takes this as an opening and moves closer to tell me that he used to be a preacher. He says "Believe me, Jesus is real and hell is real. If you don't believe in Jesus, you're going to end up in hell, and believe me, you don't want that." I probably could have been amiably dismissive at this point and just said "Thanks! Gotta go now..." but I didn't. I had been debating this very point recently online, so I guess I was feeling emboldened. I said, "So, if I'm a good person all my life, but just don't believe in Jesus, then God is going to send me to hell for that?! That's terrible! That's a horrible God, and an immoral God. That's not a God worth worshiping." Now, honestly, I think I got caught up in the adrenaline at this point and I can't remember the specifics of what was said after that. We spend a few minutes going back and forth, while I tried to ignore the people who were probably giving us funny looks while they walked passed us arguing in the aisle. He brought up something that didn't make any sense about Atom (edit: Adam :) I've gotten so used to spelling it the other way!) and Eve, and I said something about how there was no more evidence for the truth of his religion than there was for any of the other religions. Then he told me to have a nice day and that he hoped I changed my mind.

It took me 10 or 15 minutes to get back to a calm state where my heart wasn't pounding. I always kick myself after I have these kinds of in-person exchanges. So many things that I could have said, and ways that I could have made my point better. I wanted to ask him how he can love someone who would torture literally billions of innocent, good people, for ETERNITY, just because they didn't believe in him. How does he sleep at night supporting and advocating for an idea like that? I understand that a lot of people believe in a God like this. What I don't understand, is how they can think this God is a good God; a moral God, when God's so-called morality bares more resemblance to that of an evil dictator then that of a benevolent father. How is it noble to worship and love someone out of fear; out of the ever-present threat of punishment?  I try to imagine how I might feel if I actually thought this fairy-tale was real and I can only hear Christopher Hitchens in my head comparing God to a "Celestial North Korea." "Greedy, exigent, greedy for uncritical praise from dawn til dusk, and swift to punish the original sins with which is so tenderly gifted us in the first place.” Why on earth would anyone chose to love something like that? It is a contemptible position. It reeks of a self-serving desire for reward at the expense of other people's eternal torment. There is a good reason why Liberal Christianity has basically rejected the concept of hell, or else modified it into irrelevance. A loving, all-good God seems a lot less tenable when he's torturing people for eternity for thought crime...


Someday, maybe I'll try to go to a bible study group or something like that where I can practice verbal debate on religion and get better at it. Although, I have a feeling I'd probably wear out my welcome pretty quickly in a situation like that. :)