Bananas are an example. --Bruce Andrews
Brace yourself because I want to tell you about my friend Alexander who doesn't exist. Well ... he does, but not as one person. He's a composite of some of my atheist friends who, God bless them whether they know it or not, are willing to discuss religion and spirituality with me every now and then.
Alex keeps up with the conservative talking heads in the media. Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tony Snow; the usual crowd. Understandably, he wants to know what they're up to, but they get his blood pressure going. It's a martyrdom kind of thing, getting ulcers by staying educated about conservative wingnuts. (And I mean "wingnuts" in the nicest possible way.)
Like all of us and some of the true sponges, though, he has a saturation point. He OD's on demagogues (republagogues?) waxing patriotic about evil liberals who are (a) taking over the country, (b) pushing general godlessness (c) trying to make everybody atheist, Democrat, gay and vegan, (d) etc. He gets riled up and wants to talk about it to somebody and my ears are sometimes the closest pair to him.
So at some point in our composite friendship, he let loose and blasted religion in general and Christianity specifically. He's a very nice guy, for a semi-fictional composite, so don't assume he did this to bait me. It's just that in his rhetoric inspired indignation he forgot that I am a Christian. However much I share his disgust with political foment and evangelical demagoguery (yes, that is a real word; I just looked it up), I'm a Christian.
And I'm his friend so I'm happy to listen to him, to let him explode and purge the GlenBeckian treacle out of his head. Then we watch The Big Bang Theory, laugh, and talk about people we've known who are exactly like Sheldon.
That's how it works most of the time, but not on let's say, last Tuesday. He was in a heated review of the wrongs done in the name of God, religion, church, and the ways they use fear to keep their sheeple piling money on the collection plate.
On that admittedly fictitious day I couldn't be his ally as usual because it was my turn for an over saturated saturation point. I interrupted him to suggest (ahem) that some of those straw men he was beating up on were starting to look an awful lot like stuff that is important to me. I reminded him that I and his other Christian friends don't much resemble the monosyllabic blind-faith zombies he was declaiming against.
He was painting with a pretty broad brush and of course I know this is normal human behavior. We all do it. It's just that some days the brush is a little broader than others and we just don't have the energy to deal with shades of gray. We just want to be mad about this thing and blindingly white versus penetrable black are easier to navigate than the grays in between.
So I understand, but at that point I couldn't be the kind of friend I usually was, soaking up all the negativity and wringing it out somewhere in north Williamson county, where a little more negativity and treacle wouldn't even be noticed.
Jon: All Christians? You're seriously saying all Christians are like that.
Alex: [stubbornly] Yes.
Jon: Man, I'm a Christian and you know I don't think that way. None of your Christian friends do. Or do you think we're all trying to trick you into converting by lying about what we really believe?
Alex: Trick me? [Calms down a little bit. He's not an unreasonable composite.] No, I don't mean that. Maybe what you mean by 'Christian' isn't the same thing that I mean when I say 'Christian'.
Curtain.
The things in life that I love more than wise and thoughtful friends -- they are so few that they're not worth numbering. Alex laded a lot of wisdom in that statement: "
Well, maybe what you mean by 'Christian' isn't the same thing that I mean when I say 'Christian'." From Alex, I now give you François-Marie Arouet, who is better known as Voltaire, and one of his more famous sayings: "If you want to converse with me, define your terms." I remember reading that in high school and I thinking
duh. How obvious; if you're gonna be talking about bananas make sure everybody knows what bananas are.
At fourteenish, I was too naive to understand what François-Marie was talking about, ironically. I had no idea that two people using the same word weren't always talking about the same thing. I assumed that if I said 'banana' everybody would think about the largest herbaceous flowering plant, with fruit that when ripe is sweet and yellow. And the chances are really very good that with a simple concept like 'banana' we
are mostly thinking about the same thing.
When my sister was learning to talk, she confused the words 'before' and 'after' and when I tried to explain what they meant, I was stumped. 'Before' is a more complex concept than 'banana'. It's not a something you can point to or describe by shape and color. It's easy to explain what things are by pointing at them, but how do I explain words like 'think', 'process' or 'jealous'? For the answer to that, let us leave Voltaire for the moment, gentle and probably-non-existent blog reader, to turn to John Locke.
I admire John Locke a lot. If you've never read him, just trust me: it's worth deciphering the 17th century English to get to what he was talking about. The dude had it going on. He said:
The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition. It has not, that I know, been yet observed by anybody what words are, and what are not, capable of being defined; ...[this is] the occasion of great wrangling and obscurity in men's discourses, whilst some demand definitions of terms that cannot be defined....When I think back to the various arguments I've had about politics and religion, a common theme is assuming that my concept of 'bananas' is the same as the other guy's. More times than I care to think, I look back over old heated discussions and, in retrospect, realize that though we were using the same words, we were talking about entirely different things. How much this same theme plays into human affairs from world wars to political small talk, I'd hate to guess. We sometimes blow things up (other countries, friendships, ourselves) because of rash assumptions we make about
vocabulary of all things. Whatever definition you have of the word 'good,' I doubt it applies to that.
Bananas, figure 1:
Bananas, figure 2:
Bananas, figure 3:
Last night I was bouncing some of these ideas off James, poor guy. Just before his big brown eyes glazed over from boredom, I heard myself say "And does any of that really matter?" What I meant was, is this all just about semantics? Is it only about words and human confusion?
It matters. Man, does it matter. It's about way more than poTAto vs. poTAHto because horrible things like massive genocides happen over words like right, normal, moral, liberal and especially-- and who guessed I was going there? -- God. One of the biggest mistakes I notice us making as individuals and whole societies, is to assume that because we all agree what 'banana' means that we also all agree on what 'God' means. If you're over the age of like eighteen, and still think that we all have identical ideas about words like right, normal, moral and God, don't take this the wrong way, but please don't become a teacher, vote or reproduce.
This becomes clear when I talk to Alex and try to explain that what Pat Robertson means by 'god' is not the same thing that I mean by 'God'. Even words like 'theist' and 'atheist' get blurry; from my perspective I'm a kind of atheist too. I disbelieve the same little-g god that Alex disbelieves. Exactly like Alex, I don't believe that god exists except in a conservative political agenda. And I also think that we both believe in the same big-G God. Alex just don't call Him God. He calls Him love, or self-actualization, or altruism, or the universe, or a bunch of other things but from my perspective, it all pretty much refers to the same feller. Some of my atheist friends' understanding of 'the universe' looks more like the Jesus of the gospels than anything coming from the Dove Outreach Center or the mouth of Bill O'Reilly.
So the conclusion I come to is that ultimately, John Locke is right: we can't avoid this kind of miscommunication. Excuse my frankness, Mr. Voltaire, but it's naive to think we'll ever totally define our terms. It's part of the existential separateness we're born with, that we'll never understand each other 100%, at least not until heaven (a whole nother blog). But regardless of that, we still need to acknowledge the discrepancies that can possibly exist between what we mean and what other people understand. Everything else being equal, we'll never go wrong if we proceed with love and respect not only for what other people say with words like 'bananas' and 'God', but for what they mean by 'bananas' and 'God', too. My atheist friends are loving people and love comes from God, so whoever loves is God's own and knows God. I didn't make that up; 1 John 4:7. God shines from their words and actions, and I'm confident that one day they will be surprised -- like we all will be -- about what / who God really is.
Do you ever think it's funny that a lot of life's problems boil down to one or two repeating themes? To me, this one is about humility, which engenders understanding, which causes patience, which produces peace. Having a little inner and outer peace makes it easier to understand what we're all talking about when we say stuff like "God is love" or "bananas are yellow."
Because when I think about it, bananas are not yellow. Bananas are white; banana
peels are yellow.
Or does it depend on what you mean by 'bananas?
