its 2.24am and i just came back from a stroll in the park. i remember walking around the field on that newly-paved red running track, no, not the polyurethane tartan track weve all been accustomed to see at stadiums, but the more sobering kind i call concrete, and i say i remember because it was just 15 minutes ago mind you--why am i even explaining myself here? its my blog. and you should be asking why im walking around in the dark at 2am in the first place.
the night is cold and breezy. and one thing i always appreciate is the comfort i find in darkness and solitude where i can take in the surroundings and converse with my thoughts. and the grass, oh the grass. i miss the army.
i slap myself.
in the early days of this blog i always found my thoughts circling in the soup of religion and society. and after a two and half year hiatus i am back and i still am fascinated by it. if those two years in the army taught me anything, it was the tempering of my cynical views. tonight i still think about religion with the exception that i see no soup. i see a toilet of messy contents teetering the edge of a hole so deep and welcoming and i find myself beckoned to the call of the flush.
i said i feel like pulling the flush, but even i am a man of reason. i have a faith and im not about to abandon it. its the voice of the world that trouble me, that show me how ugly even the word religion is. a world where people read with some special concern when loooking at the word Muslim, where people see the word Christian and think the annoying Mormon, the bible-selling door-to-door salesman, religio-political activism, hypocrisy, evangelical zealotry, anti-homosexuality and terrible judgement. while i, being a man of independent thought, loathe to subscribe to such blind stereotypicalism, am also a realist. and in the struggle to state my stand i find myself intentionally at a distance: a Christian away from the Christians. you say hypocrisy. i say where is the flush? because the moment i argue from one camp i become but another blind partisan of a battlefield so fraught with bias that i wish for the entirety to be washed away.
but im not running away from this one. i stand aside so i can clearly see the fingerpointing from the hands of the blind. as is with many arguments i try to reason, i find it much easier to find truth when neither pointing nor being pointed at.
from my center i see guilt on both sides. there is no merit in taking at face value the song of an atheist bigot but even in the worst of skewed rhetoric is a poem of truth, and the rhyme within it is derived from the fact of a few if not many Christians who follow their religion blindly. they partake in symbolic rituals that are perfect as such, but greatly flawed applied out of context. they believe in supernatural occurrences that many a time have natural explanations. therein lies the greatest travesty of many Christians who in their blindness (willfully or not) disregard science and substitute in its place their own misinformed interpretations of faith as evidence.
and when those atheists point i find it difficult to rule against them, for i am a man of logic; while science is far from holding all the answers, its very fundamentals encourage for the asking of simple questions that can blow holes through the religious fabric of even the toughest Christians. i describe tough not in the manner of intellectual robustness, but that of being very hard nuts.
when atheists and christians clash christians always lose. because in the field of logical argumentation the man of science is always more well-equipped. the problem i always see is christians desperately trying to bolster their force by supplanting their mere opinions for evidence (when they should be rising to the opponent with the ammunition of the new age) or even disregard the rules in its entirety, thereby only successfully persuading the invisible audience that they are all but terrible at the art of persuasion. when your job is to try to persuade non believers and you are shown to be useless at your job, that is a serious blow to the nuts, bro. on the other hand, the atheist camp can also momentarily step out of discipline when drunk with their general victory. they start spewing anti religious rhetoric that could be easily refuted by the other camp, except the latter is rarely geared for a sound defence. and it pains me because that is so easy to perform, but so easy to botch by a Man of God who has neither a semblance of Logos nor Ethos in an arena outside Bible commentary.
blind Christians, stop embarrassing me. dont let the atheists trample you. the days of martyrdom have long passed. use your God-given brains and let science help you.
