The optimum inter-religious friendship: An ideological exchange
I’m an atheist, and most of my friends belong to some denomination of Christianity. I have Catholic friends, Lutheran friends, Baptist friends and Mormon friends.
If any of these denominations think any of the other denominations I’ve listed aren’t truly denominations, I apologize. I’m trying to be objective here.
Surrounding my heathen self with all these good religious folk generates much discussion. My close religious friends all try to convert me sooner or later. Some of them try multiple times.
I’m not offended or annoyed by this. Actually, I’m flattered. It tells me that they care enough about me to want to save me from eternal torment or whatever the heck awaits me in the hereafter. If I believed in a hereafter, that is. I tend to focus on the here-now.
In the course of these attempted conversions (which invariably come to naught), an intensely intellectual debate develops between me and my friend(s).
We get to the bottom of each other’s beliefs and we find out a lot more about why we believe what we believe and how we came to believe it. It’s a very enlightening and brain-cell-building process.
We quote history and philosophy to each other, we draw on many other ideologies aside from our own and we discuss each minute thread of existence instead of the whole garment.
Why, I remember this one discussion I had with a friend that went on for seven hours. We started at about eight or nine at night and finished up in the wee hours of the morning.
We couldn’t quit; it was too interesting. Both of us were tired and our throats were dry, but we stuck to our guns. We wouldn’t quit until we’d dissected each and every one of the other’s arguments and debated it thoroughly. We had to give it up eventually, though. This is college. We had video games to play.
I’ve had many similar discussions with my other religious friends, too. They all run along the same lines: “why” is the word that probably gets used the most. Why do I believe this, why do you think this is like this, well if this isn’t like this then why that and so on.
It’s all very civil. No shouting matches, personal attacks, or cheap shots. If it turns into what I call a “serial argument,” a single discussion that takes place piecemeal over several days, we’ll often take it up a notch. We’ll take pains to avoid the “everyday” arguments (“If God exists, why does He let bad things happen” is one I really loathe) and try to instead to come up with our own.
At the end of discussions like these, I always feel like I’ve had several more ounces of brain matter injected into my skull. I literally feel smarter.
I walk away with a feeling of achievement. I feel equal to the great philosophers, like Socrates, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Karl Marx and Bob Marley.
In this day and age, with people like Kim Jong-Il taking offense to any worldview that isn’t his, it’s great to have a frank, civil and intellectual exchange of ideas with someone who has views completely opposite from yours. Try it sometime; I think you’ll see what I mean.
Andrew is a senior studying mass communication.
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum