Evangelical enigma stumps subjective student

Christian evangelists continue to intrigue and confound me. Such people demonstrate a strength of faith I admire and a singularity and sureness of purpose I envy. At the same time, their audacity to try to tell me that they have discovered the absolute truth strikes me as arrogant and dangerously simplistic. Surely the point of a university is to break students from such one-dimensional thinking.

Yet it is precisely the fact that these reactions of mine are simultaneous that makes any response to evangelists so difficult. On the one hand, I fundamentally disagree with them. I could go into why I disagree — where I find fault in their faith and why I cannot follow their path — but this would be beside the point. The problem I face is how to be respectful of evangelists when I see everything in exactly the relative terms that many evangelists lament.

The true irony and paradox is that while evangelists cannot prove their position to me, neither can I prove my position to them — I have no more evidence than they do. On top of that, evangelists could be right. As much as I find their vision of God repulsive, God is not beholden to my expectations of what he should be.

It is possible that I will die, end up in front of God and he will ask me, “Why did you not believe the signs I sent you? Why did you not believe in my son, Jesus Christ, and seek forgiveness through him?” Then again, the Muslim could be right, in which case I’ll end up in front of God — with the Christian evangelist right next to me — and God will ask the two of us why we did not believe the signs he sent, why we did not follow his prophet Muhammad, why we chose the path of the infidel. Or perhaps Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism and Wicca are right and I’ll be reincarnated. How anyone can be certain perplexes me.

Some believe that Jesus rose from the dead while denying that Muhammad traveled to Jerusalem and heaven in one night, even though the evidence for each is the same. The same evidence exists for water coming from the rock Moses struck, Gabriel appearing to Muhammad or Jesus appearing to Paul or the holiness of the Torah, Suras or Gospels. To pick and choose which miracles are holy requires that we deny the veracity of events that have the same factual weight as the ones we accept.

I also cannot help but observe that while I maintain respect for evangelists’ faith, their religious dogmatism is one of the most dangerous forces on this planet. Coupled with benevolence, it leads to harmless, if annoying, pleas to come to God. But coupled with malevolence, it leads to the religiously motivated terrorism we see multiplying across the globe. Religious dogmatism is at the root of virtually every major conflict in the world today: Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, Shi’ites and Sunnis, Muslims and Christians, Darfur, even Islam and the West, to say nothing of the countless religious wars of the past, including the Crusades.

In short, I do not know how to react when Jehovah’s Witnesses appear at my door, when I read advertisements in the Thresher about the divinity of Jesus or when I see fliers inviting me to “meet” God on Tuesday night, except to try to explain the paradoxes I see every time I consider how one can claim to have found the truth or the one answer. It seems to me that we should be able to agree to disagree, but this is difficult in the face of religious traditions that call for evangelizing to the public. Yet I do not think it respectful of me to ask that a Christian stop evangelizing if that is what he believes he is commanded to do.

Well, at least the evangelists don’t have to struggle with these questions. But as Rice students, regardless of whether it strengthens or weakens our faith, I think we should.

David Axel is a Brown College senior.

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