Believers are starting to be ashamed. There is hope!

Today started poorly.

After a woefully insufficient amount of sleep, I dragged my body out of bed, ate something for breakfast (I think it was yogurt) and drove off to face the day. Half an hour later, through the cold and bitter morning air, I trudged groggily across the six blocks from my parking space to school. Then, something blog-worthy happened.

Halfway to my destination I was greeted by two ladies, one offering me a publication. “Would you like to read a bit about discrimination and racism? It’s an awareness piece, something you can read in your free time.” Now, even in my barely conscious state, a red flag went off inside my head. This was suspiciously close to the M.O. of religion panderers. My sluggish mind did its best to make a quick assessment. The messengers? Not in white tops with name-tags, no backpacks, no religious symbols. The media? Booklet covered with the faces of people from varying racial backgrounds and the headline “Prejudice and Discrimination: Why? How Can You Cope?” Again, no religious symbols in sight.

With my suspicions abated and my interest in social justice piqued, I accepted the magazine, muttered a clumsy farewell, and continued my gloomy trek towards campus. It was not until this evening that I found out that I had been duped. I opened up the booklet to find that it was indeed religious propaganda, though it did not fully reveal itself as such until the fourth page. As I read those first four pages and the reality of the situation bore down on me, my initial disappointment was surprisingly short lived. Indeed, it was quickly replaced with mirth as I considered the implications of this ordeal.

Let’s break it down. We had two believers handing out pamphlets designed to keep other believers believing and to help non-believers to start believing. That’s an old story that’s been done billions of times over. What was novel, and the cause of my amusement, was the guile of it all. It used to be that ‘Bringers of The Word’ adorned attention grabbing robes, stood atop platforms, and called out their proclamation with fever. These messengers, on the other hand, wore non-descript, commonplace clothing, did not mention God or any religious affiliation, and quickly walked away once their media was distributed. The booklet itself was similarly shrouded. The cover lent itself to the assumption that the publication’s sole concern was the issue of prejudice. As I mentioned earlier, it took three pages of warming up before the religious slant fully made itself known.

This level of duplicity is reserved for actions we consider amoral, shameful, or just plain wrong. It was like a child who doesn’t lie, but artfully avoids telling the whole truth, then runs away while the adults are left to discover the facts of the matter. It brought me joy to see believers (not to mention their publications) displaying this kind of abashed behaviour. It means that somewhere, deep within their subconscious, the realization of wrongdoing is starting to take hold. Sure, they are very far from consciously being aware of and admitting their erroneous ways of delusion and misanthropy, but the point is that they have at least started down that path.

Sooner or later, they will ask themselves “If what I’m doing is good, then why must I be deceptive about it and why does it make me feel bad?” And suddenly they will understand. They will know that what they are doing can’t be good. They will see that “It says so in the Bible ->Why believe the Bible?->It’s the word of god->How do you know?->It says so in the Bible” is circular and cannot support any belief system. They will recognize that their previous distinctions of ‘saved vs damned’, ‘righteous vs blasphemous’, ‘believers vs heathens’, ‘saints vs infidels’, and ‘chosen vs forsaken’ were all false. They will drop their delusions and the world will enter an era of rationality and prosperity. And when that happens, they will truly be ready and mentally equipped to fight social injustices like discrimination.