I should have heard the religious music playing. I should have seen the Bible that the girl up front was reading. Still, I entered. Had I suddenly wandered into a vortex that bent space-time, turning the most innocuous of establishments into an evangelical church? No, of course not. I was at Lakewood Mall and had walked into a sports store looking for a jersey with one of my favorite football players’ names on it.
I’ve written about religion before and if you’ve ever had the pleasure of reading one of my columns, you know that I’m not a fan. I don’t like the dogma that it espouses, and I especially hate the insanity that it breeds. Still, I will always say to each his own, and if I am not directly challenged by a religious nut I will let them go on their merry way, blissfully ignorant.
This was not one of those days.
I was on a search for a jersey, but what started off as one fan’s search for an item expressing my fandom turned into a journey of religious exploration. Did I learn from the error of my ways and accept Jesus as my personal lord and savior? Read on to find out.
The girl behind the counter was cute, which is why I began talking to her. I thought she was down-to-earth and pretty normal, until she told me she was flying to Hawaii the next week in order to go to “Bible college.” Oh, I thought, she’s one of those types.
Apparently she heard me think that because almost immediately she was on the defensive. “I noticed you seemed taken aback by me going to a Bible school,” she said. “It’s OK, I get that a lot.” After I made the mistake of telling her I am an atheist she immediately flipped to her favorite Bible passage and began “challenging” me to confront my beliefs.
Picking up a handful of Chap Sticks, she held them up and then dropped them on the counter, asking me if it was possible for her to drop them in such a way that they would form the shape of a star. This is when the theological argument first reared its ugly head. Surely it had to be divine intervention that set the universe in motion. “These things just don’t happen by themselves!” she shouted.
Her next item of “proof” in the existence of a higher power was that she had a friend who had cancer that had been given something like two weeks to live, but miraculously the cancer went away, and the person is now perfectly fine. These things sometimes happen. This is why it’s called an exception, since usually malignant cancer ends in death. So god likes to be a bastard most of the time, but sometimes he’ll let one poor schmuck slip through the cracks. Prayer, according to her, works.
Next the girl asked me if I would like to be eternally damned by having hot oil dripping on me for the rest of eternity, because that is obviously what is going to happen if I don’t repent.
“Some people like that kind of thing,” I said, rolling my eyes.
Before I took my leave the religious sycophant gave me my homework assignment: read the Book of John and the Book of Some-other-shit-I-can’t-remember and then ask myself the questions she asked me today. Yeah, I think I’ll pass on that.
What makes me laugh about all this is that according to her, I am the crazy one for not believing in nonsense. Apparently a girl working at a sports store in the mall who makes $6 an hour knows more about the world and what happens when we die than even the smartest scientist and intellectual. In actuality, all this conversation did was remind me that religion is truly for the weak-minded and stupid among us.
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
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