Here’s a funny thing.
I say funny . . . it’s actually only funny in the sense that a really fat guy trying to get down some stairs is funny. Granted, it’s pretty funny, but there’s an undercurrent of pathos.
My girlfriend got kicked out of her maths class a couple of days ago for saying God didn’t exist. When people expressed righteous anger at this perspective, she challenged them to prove God did exist. Some people got angry and her tutor sent her out – not only because she was “offending” students but the tutor as well.
My only suggestion to her was not to state “God doesn’t exist”, as then we occupy that dangerous faith-based stance; but to state “There is a chance, but it’s merely a logical necessity dictated by the deductive nature of empirical observation.” Although it didn’t sound as if anyone in her class was aware of such subtleties. No, they were simply offended that someone had disrespected their faith.
As my GF said, she’s just as offended by assertions that man should not lie with man, or that a rapist could go to heaven if he repents. In fact there was a whole bunch of stuff she only thought of saying afterwards, as is often the case with impromptu debates. Her tutor actually used the “prove God doesn’t exist” argument, which is sort of like punching a kitten in the face. As we all know, the correct response is “Oh, so you are granting equal probability to Ra, Thor, Neptune, trolls and djinn then? You can’t completely disprove them, do you believe in them? Do you believe in Allah? I hear he’s very popular.”
There often isn’t a very good answer to that question. When some street preacher said I was accountable to God, I asked him why he wasn’t accountable to Allah. His answer? Sidestep.
Magnificent.
The annoying thing is that when Christians get removed from classrooms for telling children they will go to hell, it gets in the papers and the poor child is raised on the shoulders of giants. It’s religious intolerance, apparently, to stop someone inflicting mental bullying on someone else.
If my GF complained, I can’t see it getting too far. It is the believers of the world who hold some kind of nebulous high ground, and I don’t know why.
The thing that made me especially sick were the intimations of violence to my GF from other classmates, which frankly makes me want to fly down there and beat them like naughty puppies. Can no-one see that as soon as a position has to be protected from debate by violence and censorship, it’s lost the game?
