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some topics are off-limits
She got married several years ago to Daniel, so since then the visits have included him -- and, now that I'm married, also Dani. She and Daniel are both committed Christians (specific denomination unknown to me -- they just say "Christian", and I haven't pressed it). Daniel seems like a nice person, though we don't know each other that well.
Last night we had them out for dinner, and Daniel and I got into an annoying argument about religion. (He started it.) I thought we were having one of those intellectual-style arguments where you're looking at facts and logic, but it became apparent that he was having an argument about faith and belief, and then wouldn't take hints that this was Not A Good Idea. Once I figured out what was going on I tried to change the subject and eventually just stopped responding, but even that did not get through to him. Eventually Lori told him to stop and Dani was able to redirect the conversation. I felt like a bad host, though I can't help feeling that I also had a bad guest. (I should clarify that I like Daniel, at the basic social level that we've achieved thus far. I was kind of surprised by this.)
Out of a discussion of terrorism etc, Daniel made the statement that Muslims don't worship the same god that Jews and Christians do, but that Jews and Christians worship the same god. I said I didn't agree, and that either the three religions have three distinct views of God or they all worship basically the same god -- depending on how vague you want to be -- but that I did not see a "Judeo-Christian" god [sic -- he used that term, not me] vs a Muslim god. He wanted to discuss that.
His initial basis for his statement was views of the afterlife -- that Muslims believe in paradise with 70 virgins if you die in a holy war, but obviously we do not. (Aside: He insisted that the number was 7, not 70. I suspect that his knowledge of Islam comes entirely from fuzzily-remembered newspaper stories since September.) I said that the Jewish and Christian views of the afterlife are pretty different from each other, too, but I don't think he believed anything I said about the Jewish view. (The main factor there, by the way, is that the whole afterlife idea came pretty late, and we don't have a unified, well-developed understanding.) I pointed out that this was a tangent.
He asked me what difference I saw between the Christian god and the Jewish god. I said "well, there's Jesus, for starters". This was probably a bad idea, because it should be possible to talk about "god the father" independently of "god the son", but I realized this too late. He was off on a roll and it would take another five minutes to successfully interrupt him.
Now, sometime before this happened he had proposed that we stick to the "old testament", "because we can agree on that". (I decided that I would not even bring up issues such as the interpretation of Isaiah, unless he did.) So I was a little surprised when just a few minutes later he was on a roll quoting gospels and other Christian writings to show that Jesus and God were the same. To my mind that meant he was making my point for me -- Jews don't accept Jesus as God -- but he wasn't really hearing that. He also kept saying that the Christian god was the god of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, because the gospels say so.
(He then started misquoting Torah, starting with Moses' encounter at the burning bush. I resisted the urge to correct him (hey, I last read that portion just last month), because I also didn't see what that had to do with anything. I never did get where he was going with this. It revolved around God's name, but I didn't see how this related to his point.)
He kept bringing sources from the "new testament", and eventually I said that, essentially, that a book says something doesn't make it so -- Islam also makes claims about continuity and Daniel had rejected those out of hand. The irony of preaching Christian reinterpretations of Judaism, while objecting to Islam doing the same with Christianity, was lost on him. (I should clarify here, as I did for Daniel, that I was not making an argument about the truth of any of these writings here; I was making an argument for consistency.)
I was just trying to get him to apply the same analytic standards to each religion's teachings, and when applicable to actually look at what the texts said rather than presuming interpretations. But around this point it became abundantly clear that that he was interested in evangelism, not reasoned discussion, so I stopped responding. Fortunately, Dani was able to change the subject before too much longer.
Ironically, the only person at the table who had actually read the Koran was Lori. I've read excerpts, quoted in other books. I don't presume to have the correct context for much of it, though ironically, just yesterday afternoon I was reading a religious-history text on views of God among these three religions. (Report coming later; I'm not done yet.)
I haven't figured out whether Daniel isn't as accustomed to analytical thought as I had presumed, or if this is just a blind spot for him where emotion governs intellect. (We all have them, after all.) Oh well. Lori knows us both well (and she and I have had many such analytic-style debates), so I wish she had detected the problem and acted on it earlier.
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It's when the second condition fails that I really start to worry--doublethink is a really nasty practice.
Unfortunately, I'm going to guess that a significant portion of the population isn't really bothered too much by it.
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Yes. For example, if you believe in God -- which you are probably taking on faith, as absolute proofs of this are challenging -- then you come to see evidence of God's presence in the world. For me, belief in God was a leap of faith that was then confirmed by other factors. Confirmation isn't the same as proof, but *to me* it is all logically consistent. Because I can't prove it, though, I can't make it logically consistent *for you*.
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