Over the summer, I once found myself on the subway with a non-New Yorker friend of mine when one of those obnoxious subterranean sermonizers stumbled into our subway car and began to rant. I had forgotten to instruct my friend to feign blindness and deafness when faced with such urban insolence, so she listened unabashedly. We were treated to some run-of-the-mill drivel informing us of the usual truism that if we do not accept Jesus Christ the lord as our savior, we will suffer an inferno of infinite agony for eternity. Just as the sermonizer finished, my friend, by a stroke of really extraordinary stupidity, exclaimed the following announcement loudly and clearly, not only to the sermonizer but also to the car at large: "Excuse me, sir, I'm an atheist."
There was a moment of stunned silence in the car during which I counted three dropped jaws, but the primary effect of my friend's proclamation was to incite another stop's worth of ranting from the sermonizer, during which he made perfectly clear that her objection had damned her straight to hell with no chance of parole, and that this was a good and necessary thing.
There was a young, stylish woman sitting to my friend's other side whom I hadn't previously noticed. She was wearing several pieces of not-cheap jewelry, a shirt bearing the name of an Ivy League university (not this one), and a great tan. She looked up courteously from the book she was reading (a Tolstoy) and said to my friend matter-of-factly, "He's right, you know." Then she left the train. It was my jaw's turn to drop.
That woman, along with millions of others in this country and worldwide, is completely and utterly certain that from the moment my friend dies, she will be tortured in a hellpit of infinite agony forever. Certainly not all religious people think this, but many do. They are of all races, classes and colors, and many live normal 21st century lives, just like my friend. They listen to iPods like her, eat bagels like her, read Tolstoy like her -- they just happen to know that she will spend forever in unimaginable torture. It's a juicy little morsel, isn't it? No doubt has ever entered their minds; they are as perfectly sure of my friend's damnation as they are of basic arithmetic facts.
This realization left me a little amused and a little annoyed, but mostly sad. It is simply sad that even in this most affluent and advanced of societies, humanity's age-old thought-jealousy still persists so strongly: agree or burn.
But many of those who consider themselves devout simply ignore or deny the more morbid and violent sections of their various sacred texts. Certainly that is better than accepting them as truth, but it strikes me as roundabout and strange. It's like a Nazi saying, "Yes, I live my life by 'Mein Kampf' -- no, I ignore the more controversial bits." Religious toleration and strictly textualist religious belief are utterly irreconcilable.
My subway experience puts proselytizing into perspective. If I belonged to a textualist religious sect, I would undoubtedly devote every ounce of my time and energy to converting unbelievers. I would do this not out of any particular desire to spread the faith, but to save the masses from hellfire. Any member of any sect that holds all non-members to be damned is consigning literally billions of human beings to the eternal flame. That's many times more than the combined casualties of all the wars, genocides and calamities you can name, and I couldn't bear so much blood on my hands. Apparently proselytizers can't either, and for that they deserve recognition.
But what of those devout believers who do not proselytize? What of the woman on the subway, who expressed indifference at the idea that my friend would suffer infinite agony forever? What of the devout millions nationally and worldwide who revel in the righteous damnation of their neighbors? I cannot see how this religious behavior is anything other than sadism and sociopathy on a grand scale.
Eternal torture is a pretty hefty punishment. I don't know about the morals of the devout, but my morals just don't allow me to wish that sort of thing on anybody. As for subway sermonizing -- it's just not for me.
