A little girl in pigtails came up to me last week while I was sitting in the café. I looked at her and smiled. She smiled back, and then, with nothing else to do, I returned to my writing while she was standing right next to me, staring at me.“Excuse me.”
“Yes, little girl?”
“Are you a Christian?”
Oh Jesus, I thought. I was never that great with little kids and now I really had to come up with something good, something tactful, something to keep myself calm while, at the same time, not making her run off screaming devil and crying hysterically.
“Why?” That was the best I could do? Okay. Okay, I asked why, that’s okay.
“Because, if, if you’re not, you’ll go to hell. I don’t want you to go to hell.”
“I don’t believe in hell.”
Her mouth dropped open and I looked around to see who my audience was. I had two gray-haired women staring at me, one through her spectacles, the other one from over her spectacles’ rims.
“But there is a hell.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not, it’s in the bible.”
Here it goes. Now I have to look like a jerk and be a pain in the ass with a little girl in pigtails. “I don’t read the bible.”
“You should. You’ll go to hell if you don’t.”
“You forget, I don’t believe in hell.”
“Just because you don’t believe in it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
“Do you believe in Lala land?” I asked her.
“What’s Lala Land?”
“A lot of people already live there and they don’t believe it.”
“Is it in the bible?”
“I don’t know, I don’t read the bible.”
“Do you go to church?”
“Not your church.”
“But you go to a church?”
“Listen little girl…you’re really cute and all, but I don’t believe in Jesus.”
Friday, October 12, 2007
'Listen little girl, you're really cute and all, but I don't believe in Jesus'
I'm going to withhold my comments on this post, via the Friendly Atheist, and open this conversation, as retold by a University of Colorado student, up to lots and lots of your comments.
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3 comments:
I was thinking about this in a different way.
I have a daughter of four years old. The other day, she noticed for the first time someone lighting a cigarette. She knows it's bad to smoke but, she's not really exposed to smokers. She said "I just saw a lady put a tube in her mouth and light the end on fire." I told her she was lighting a cigarette, and we left it at that.
But I thought about what if I was to send my cute little daughter over to her to say "Cigarettes cause cancer, and I don't want you to die before your time. Please quit smoking... I know you probably have grandchildren who love you... you want to see them grow up, don't you?"
Now, assuming that "cigarettes cause cancer" is a shared truth... one that well-nigh-everyone accepts regardless of religious background. This isn't a "abandon your beliefs and accept mine" question.
Assuming that everyone knows about the cancer risk accompanying smoking... is sending my daughter to do this okay?
And my answer was still an emphatic no.
Number one, because it would be using my daughter as a PROP, not a person.
Number two, because presumably this person knows the score and has made their life decisions accordingly.
Number three, because breaking the privacy of someone else is a pushy thing to do if they're not bothering me.
Futher, I'd expect that if I DID do that with this woman, I should very well expect a torrent of profanity to come my way, as well as quite a few "how dare you"s, and the episode would not be a good example for interpersonal communication for my daughter.
There is such a thing as a social contract, and when someone breaches it, people generally feel they have the right to retaliate.
I think his retaliation was milder than the one I was likely to get by sending my daughter over to the smoker.
Do I condone non-violent retaliation? I actually do, within reason, and as long as there's parity between the retaliation and the infraction. If they think the daughter is the perfect messenger for discussions about faith, then she might be the perfect messenger to take a message back to them about the same subject.
-Siamang
American evangelism is broken, badly.
A cute little girl in pig-tails giving away beautiful flowers would have been more effective
A friend e-mailed sent me this response on Facebook:
While I do not agree with him, and while (if he'd have given me the time of day) I would have, I think been able to engage him, I think his answer was probably good for the girl. I am certain that her approach was not really something that was going to affect him in the slightest. He knows that he's done a whole lot more thinking on the concepts of philosophy of religion than a naive little girl.
But I wonder how well he'd fare with someone who knew how to probe his mind.
I also hope the little girl will be duly confused enough to realize that she's going to need another approach IF she thinks she should be engaging atheists and agnostics. I am very grateful for my upbringing in a small church in Southwest Texas. It was that congregagtions's belief (THEN) that none of the 25 of us in our high school youth group should leave our town and head off for college without a buttload of information on how to engage skeptics. We read about evolution, arguments for the resurrection, arguments for why the Biblical documents are historically accurate, arguments about why the miraculous should make sense to a thinking man, and we considered arguments about why Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God. I don't know that I understood the meaning of that term, "Son of God," then as well as I understand it now, but mine was not a piss ant's connection with things relative to Christian apologetics, and I have never felt at a loss with what to say to a skeptic, nor have I ever been disappointed in a conversation with one who was willing to intellectually engage the subject.
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