Yesterday, some pressure was reapplied. After we’d left the service and exited the building, one of the preachers came out and flagged us down. He said he wanted to “get together with me” sometime this week, to just talk with me.

I know where this action came from. I had been talking to my mom about Christianity, asking her questions, one of which I wanted her to pose to this particular preacher. Specifically: If God is all-knowing, and always has been, why did he have to take human form as Jesus to “know what it was like to feel human suffering?” If he knows everything, shouldn’t he have known that long before?

She asked him this question at one of her church classes, which led to him wanting to talk with me, one on one. Which is fine, by the way. Here’s the rub: I don’t want to insult him. While I don’t agree with his set of beliefs, I do respect the guy, and I really don’t want to put him off. I know he’s going to ask me my thoughts on religion, God, etc., and I have some concern that my responses, regardless of how polite I share them, may bother him or make him mad, e.g.:

Him: “What’s your take on Jesus?”

Me: “I think that it’s likely that the Jesus figure is a copy, a reiteration of previous ‘hero’ figures. He shares many similarities with prophet types who supposedly lived before him – bringing salvation, father of a god, death, resurrection after 3 days, etc.”

I have similar thoughts on a lot of things about Christianity, which I won’t get into in this post, because it’s not the point; the point is, I just really, really don’t want to insult the guy. I respect him, and I also know that he likes my mom quite well, and I don’t want to disrupt their relationship. On the other hand, I don’t want to say “No, I don’t want to meet with you”, because that’ll come across as rude, too.

And thus, faithful readers, I pose this question: Any ideas? Keep in mind, he knows I consider myself Buddhist, so perhaps I’m getting worked up for nothing. Perhaps he expects such responses from me.

I want to touch on a specific scene from the film, which really struck me as odd. The scene in question is one showing President Truman, sitting at a desk, speaking to the American public. He says:

“Having found the atomic bomb, we have used it. It is an awful responsibility which has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us instead of to our enemies and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His way and for His purposes.“

(emphasis mine)

I don’t believe in the Christian God, but let’s say he exists, for the sake of argument. As I understand it, the Christian God loves everyone. All humans are his creation, and he cares about all of us equally, regardless of what we do. Certainly, there are rules that one should listen to, but if you break the rules, you can generally get him to forgive you (depending on what branch of Christianity you’re dealing with).

So, God loves everyone. And, being an omnipotent being, viewing everything all at once, he probably doesn’t think of his creation in terms of nationalities, countries, races. Everything on the planet is his creation. God doesn’t see the globe with national boundaries pencilled in.

And yet, in the above quote, we have an American President thanking God for, essentially, letting America “find the atomic bomb” first, and then going on to say that he hopes God will help them to use the weapon to do good.

This makes no sense to me. If God existed, and we were all his creations, and he loved all of us equally, I’m fairly confident that one thing he wouldn’t want us to do would be to “find” the most devastating weapon ever created, and then use it to blow up hundreds of thousands of people. That just doesn’t come across as very loving to me.

Perhaps it’s because we’re talking about America here, an admittedly special case – at least in the minds of many people. All Americans (and probably just about everyone else who’s hooked into the world via the internet or some other news outlet) have heard the phrase “God bless America.” Our Presidents, particularly the most recent one, have regularly claimed that God is on our side. It doesn’t seem to matter what the government is doing, or how morally wrong it is – because it’s America doing it, a lot of people think it’s fine, because they have this strange idea that God is on “our side.” I think it’s interesting to note that when other countries or groups do this – like when Islamist fundamentalists claim that God wanted them to blow something up – Americans generally scoff and say that the Islamist fundamentalists are just “evil” (whatever that means).

Claiming that God is on “our” side is nothing new; nations have done it for centuries. But America seems particularly bad about it. I’ve read many times online that a lot of Europeans look at our politics with some amusement, because of how often our politicians throw God into the mix. I’ve talked to some Europeans who find it downright peculiar. I do too, but I suppose that’s pretty clear from this entry.

So – I don’t believe in God, but if you do, and you’re someone who thinks that he’s on “our side”, perhaps you should reconsider. Maybe he isn’t on our side. Maybe God is getting fed up with America tossing his name around like a football. If I were in his position, I probably would be. Nukes for God… indeed. I’m sure right below that one, on God’s to-do list, he has “Insure America secures oil supply in Iraq and Afghanistan.”