Talkin' Faith or Methinks the Lady Protests Too Much

For the past couple of days on Twitter I have engaged in a rather amusing exchange with a very earnest (seemingly humorless) atheist who insists that one can only believe one way.

For the record, I'm a Christian with a strong sense of social justice and religious tolerance. I may think you are wrong in what you believe, but accept that you believe it.

Now, I enjoy a stimulating exchange of ideas with someone with whom I disagree. However, I do consider it unproductive to be told what I should believe and ridiculed when I have a different take on it.

I know Christians like that -- well-meaning, earnest people who are so committed to their idea of what a Christian should be that they get flustered and bombastic in an attempt to cling rigidly to it. You will find people like that in all belief systems.

But I find atheists particularly negative. And I don't understand why. Is it because in their vehement denial of God, they are hiding a yearning for answers? My experience is that the more defensive someone becomes, the more uncertain of their convictions they will eventually prove to be.

At no time did I try to persuade her to change her mind, or disrespect her belief that there is no God. I disagree with her, obviously, but I will not tells someone flat out they are wrong. The basis of our discussion was my contention with her interpretation of a line in scripture. In an intelligent discussion, we can acknowledge that our understanding of something was incorrect, while still maintaining our core beliefs.

It seemed almost as if her whole lack of faith in God was a house of cards: If she admitted she was wrong about one thing, it would all fall around her. That should not be the case. Any faith, or even a lack of faith, should withstand scrutiny.

She accused me of being afraid of atheism, when in fact she displayed more fear of something that didn't agree with her. Every time I started to challenge her to prove their is no G-d, a viewpoint she was trying to persuade me to, she would put the burden of proving God's existence to her.

I find it fascinating that someone would have to work so hard to debunk God's existence, when it takes me so little to prove it.

Faith is a personal, spiritual experience, as different as we are as individuals. Why we should have to conform to one idea tells me that there are scared people, searching for a greater meaning in life. I know that there are Christians who, like the dwarfs in C.S. Lewis's novel The Last Battle who, in the midst of the light and beauty of Aslan's Country, insist that they are in a dark dimly lit, dirty stable. No matter what the people surrounding them say or offer to them, they insist that they are in that place. In the same way, her mind was so closed to any kind of epxlanation that it was an exercise in futility to talk to her.

In spite of that, I talked back. You never know when a seed will be planted. And while I am fairly certain mine fell on cement, there is always a crack.