Ten Things I Hate About You: #3 - Thinking Of You

One of the things that I've noticed about Christians when they rush off to decry about some new evil that of course has to be the latest and greatest threat to humanity is how little they know about what that new evil actually is. Nine times out of ten, it'll usually be a situation where the actual reason why that new evil actually is evil is because someone else told you to think it was evil. And if that's ever happened to you, have you ever stopped and asked why you need to think it's evil? How many Creationists or Evolution-deniers have you known who've actually read Darwin's "Origin of Species"? How about quote-unquote "Islamophobes" who've actually read the Koran? Or Homophobes who've actually talked to and known gay people?

Of course, it's much more easier and a lot more simpler to dispense with that altogether, because after all, if your Pastor tells you something, it has to be true, right?

A few months ago, I decided to go to a Protestant church service with two of my friends, just for kicks. The subject of the homily given was about intellectuals, and, towards the middle of the sermon, the pastor railed on evolutionary biology and mainstream science - he said that it had grieved him to know that children were being taught such things, and pulled out the usual distorted quote taken out of context from some biologist about how The Theory of Evolution was really just another religion. To put the cherry on top, he pulled out a typical Richard Dawkins quote extolling the virtues of atheistic, materialistic evolutionary science over religion.

Of course, never mind the fact that evolutionary biology, like the rest of science, doesn't concern itself with questions of religion. Go through the scientific writings of Darwin (and many, many others) and you'll find that books like Origin of Species say nothing about the invalidation of God or Christ, or the Bible. Pull out the latest issue of Science, Nature, Ecology, or Cell. Do they make any implicit statements in their research papers on the invalidation of Christianity?

Hitting close to home was an experience I had when I was 18, and just beginning to be fully aware of my faith as a Christian. I hung out a lot on list-servs and on one of them, a young girl asked about Catholicism. What ended up happening was a horrible, horrible experience for me, where the others perpetuated lie after lie after lie about Catholicism and Catholics. Lies like claims about how Catholics practice idolatry because supposedly, Catholics "worship the Saints" or "worship statues". Never mind that the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church is more than a little explicit about the fact that that's just not true. Not one of them had either been to a Catholic Mass or had known Catholics outside of myself and one other person (who meekly kept out of the way of the discussion). The list's moderator had known several Catholics as a child who had regrettably been very mean to him - this only reinforced his beliefs that he repeated again, and again, despite the fact that it was clear that he had no possible idea about what he was talking about. As he thundered about how awful and sinful Catholics were, more and more people followed him, and unquestioningly believed what he said, automatically assuming it to be true by default.

After all, why let something as insignificant as the facts get in the way of a good bashing?

The core problem here is that Christians, in my experience at least, in our emphasis of group coherence, have lost the ability to truly think and reason for ourselves about what others around us are saying - a problem affecting Catholics and Protestants alike. I've seen this in discussions about evolution, but also about homosexuality and sexual education as well - repeated memes about how abstinence-only sexual education is the only effective form of sexual education (at the total exclusion of anything else), or about other religions, or cultures or sexual orientations. Disagreeing or vilifying them of someone's own accord is one thing - doing so because your church leaders or your church group has told you to (without any question from you) is something else.

This is a dangerous place to be in for Christians, for without the ability to exercise rational examination of any claim about anything forwarded by a church's leaders, Christians end up being nothing more than mindless robots sent to attack anything that the leader or leaders disagree with, regardless of its level of true "evil".

I've often heard that Catholics especially find the notion of suicide distasteful and offensive because it's tantamount to inviting friends over for a birthday party and throwing the gifts they hand you back at them. Life is a sacred gift given to us by God, and to commit suicide is to commit one of the most grievous insults against God - not only a refusal of a profound gift from God, but a refusal indignant, and ungrateful.

I've come to think that the unconscious forsaking of rational-minded thinking among Christians to be intellectually, almost the same. Not only did God freely give us life, but God also freely gave us a mind to use with it. Forsaking our ability to think freely as human beings (and to effectively let other people do the thinking for us) is to say to God that we not only don't need freedom of thought - we don't want it, and don't care about it at all, and simply don't appreciate or are grateful for the wonders that come with it.