A Question of Faith

During dinner on Easter Monday with my husband's eldest daughter and her husband who are active in their Baptist church, my husband asked me to relate the story of the visit Jehovah's Witness missionaries made to our home. In some ways it's a rather funny story, and in another, one that says something about "organized religion".

The story goes like this. I had just come home from a few weeks on the road in Brisbane and Sydney (I'm a stand up comic) and was catching up on chores on that Saturday afternoon. I had plugged in the vacuum cleaner, taken out a load of laundry and was gathering another armload while making note of things to get at the grocery store. In other words, I was busy. My husband had just returned from doing errands, when there was a knock at the door.

I opened it to find two earnest looking clean cut young men in business attire, shirt and tie, carrying bibles and religious pamphlets. One was perhaps 18 years old at the most; the other, clearly his supervisor/trainer I judged to be in his mid-twenties. He stood a step or two behind the younger one at the door, expecting him to take the lead. I groaned inwardly. Great, just what I needed. My husband, as he usually does in these situations, disappeared into his office and left me to deal with it.

After basic pleasantries, David (he had a name tag) launched into his opening gambit. "Are you familiar with the Bible?" he asked. Let's see - nine years of Catholic school where attendance at daily Mass was mandatory, catechism class every Wednesday plus every Sunday at church with the family - I felt qualified to say, "Yes." At this point, I could see David was much encouraged. So far I hadn't slammed the door in his face or subjected him to any verbal abuse. Being a missionary is a tough gig. He probably thought, "Finally! This could be good."

The message he was sharing today, he said, was that in the near future (no date given) all the unfaithful and non-believers would be punished and destroyed, and only the faithful would be left. And you had to be prepared to be one of the lucky ones, the faithful, to enjoy the life that would be given to those so blessed: no war, no famine, no disease, no suffering; our rewards for our faith would be wonderful. I nodded my head, showing him I understood his point. Then I'm afraid I threw a spanner in the works.

"So what you're saying is, then it will be heaven on earth." David stopped and looked at me. He said, "What?" He looked a bit nervous then. I said, "Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the punishment for disobeying God's command not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden? And from that day on, the lot of man was to suffer, to toil, for women to know the pain of childbirth, for our bodies to experience disease, famine, and so forth?" David now looked to his companion for a little help. None came. "So," I continued, "if all that suffering is now ended, and only the righteous are left, it would no longer be earth as we know it. It would be heaven, and if it was heaven, then that's it for man, then, right? We'd all return to God and be with Him as perfect beings like the angels in heaven." I didn't mean to torture the kid, but at this point, he looked distinctly uncomfortable.

There followed an awkward silence. Finally, David gave in. He said he'd be happy to leave the latest issue of their magazine, and hoped we could talk again some time, but they needed to move on to the next house and not interrupt my busy day any further. And off they went. I'm sure they had a lot to talk about on their way to the next stop.

For months after that, whenever the missionaries would come to the neighborhood, they gave our house a wide berth. My husband even saw them cross the street to avoid us. I felt like someone had smeared lamb's blood on our door, or even garlic, because no one ever came back for a chat. My husband still thinks this is hilarious.

My point in telling this story is that if you're going to come to my house uninvited to talk about and/or convince me to buy into your brand of faith (or politics for that matter) then be prepared for a full discussion and make that time count. And if, like any salesman, you don't know your product well enough to convince me of its worth, then you need to go and get your act together if you expect to change my mind.

Dogmatism just doesn't work on me. You know, the down side of having Adam and Eve screw it up for everyone else (and for the sake of argument, let's assume the story is true) is that humans now have to work hard for a living and suffer "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." Bummer. The up side is that human beings were given a tremendous power: the power of choice. And to quote the Bard yet again, "there's the rub." Because choice presupposes that you need to be informed, educated, get the facts before weighing the evidence and choosing what to do. If you choose something just because someone tells you to choose it, you run the danger of never fully committing to that choice because you didn't actually choose it yourself. You didn't get the chance to question, to consider, to eliminate all other possibilities, and finally commit to it by choice and then live by it.

Having said all of that, believe it or not, I do believe in faith. Faith and its corollary hope are powerful tools to get through life when the quantifiable elements of the world beat you up and wear you down. It has a profound effect on your logical mind, instructing that computer in your brain to put the energy in motion to makes things happen the way you believe they should. . When you believe strongly that you can succeed at some task when all odds are against it, you do. There's no rational explanation for how that works, yet it happens all the time.

So I guess the point is that you can have faith without dogmatism. You can behave in a moral, forthright manner without being a card carrying member of a particular religion. And if you encounter someone selling a particular brand of religion, politics, history, beliefs of any kind that refuses you the opportunity to honestly question and understand what they're saying, give them the flick.

That's the moral to this story. No question.