The local Whole Foods is a diverse environment. Sometimes friendly, sometimes full of anger, one can hear the gamut of languages, see the spectrum of human coloration, and either sponge up or Teflon away the broad range of religious and political views it patrons are likely to project into the mix.
There are a number of Haitian employees who gather for their morning break and bellow into their phones in Creole. At noon, the cafeteria is a veritable Babel of culture. We even have some regulars, and my conversations with them sometimes carry on too long, keeping me from writing pieces like this one, or doing other computer related work.
One man who says he’s been sitting at the same table for the past 8 years is obviously an Evangelical of some kind, I’m guessing Pentecostal, and has strong and predictable opinions on evolution, gay marriage, Obama, and most of the popular current issues. He also preaches and counsels whoever will sit with him. Believe it or not, that’s a lot of people.
One day I was sitting at a back table indoors, where “Len” usually sits. A man came by asking if anybody had seen Len that day. I thought I’d strike up a conversation, if only for a few minutes.
“He’s a godly man,” said the stranger, “who used to be a man of the world. He must have been, he has tattoos of skulls on his arms.”
The stranger began to dominate the conversation in the usual ways, by complaining about the lack of prayer and God in school, and the woeful state of public education. He was bitter, and his bitterness was swelling.
For my part, I had had enough of conceding the conversation to the dominant paradigm. That is, being unnecessarily conciliatory to religious people who, receiving the benefit of years of social conditioning, have come to believe that their opinion is the only true one, that it is the inalienable right of anyone publicly preaching the Christian mythos that the rest of us must patiently and unobjectionably listen.
The stranger ranted to me about “the knowledge of man” and it was hard to tell what that meant, except by his tone I guess the “knowledge of man” was inferior. He generalized this defect to science, which didn’t know as much as it thought it knew. Our knowledge was making us so much unhappier, while the Puritan Pilgrims had it so good. It was inevitable, and he did, excoriate Darwin.
“Evolution. What is that? Just a theory!”
Well, I have heard this talking point numerous times, and I was prepared for it.
“A theory with lots of fossil evidence to back it up,” I said.
“What evidence? Where is the evidence?”
“The evidence is distributed in universities and museums all over the world. The fossil record pretty much confirms evolution,” I said.
“Nonsense. What about the missing link? How come they haven’t found that yet?”
“Now, what missing link would that be? Every new species is an intermediate species. It is the missing link between the species it evolved from, and the species that will follow it. Besides,” I went on, energized by organic food and vitamins, and good coffee, “if evolution doesn’t exist because ‘it’s only a theory,’ then that must mean music doesn’t exist, either, or gravity, or electricity, because they are all only theories.”
…
The Washington Post posted this picture on Facebook. It is an ad they were printing, and someone mailed it to them with invective in red.
Oh, this poor fellow was positively vexed. His arms began to thrash, the veins in his neck stood out. His face turned red, and he got in my face.
“You will come back as an animal!” he cursed. This was an odd thing for a fundamentalist Christian to say, and I couldn’t be sure if he wasn’t assuming I was Buddhist and mocking me.
“Do animals make music?” he shouted.
“Of course, some animals do. Birds do,” I answered.
He was positively livid by now.
“What about gay marriage? I suppose you are for that, too.”
“Gay marriage does not inure me in any way, nor does it pick my pocket,” I said, paraphrasing Jefferson’s famous quote on polytheism.
The rabid stranger was cursing me, and I was trying to maintain my composure.
“A good day to you Sir,” I said as if I was an Englishman.
“You will come back as an animal!” he shouted.
“Good day, Sir.”
“You’re wrong! The knowledge of men!” he mockingly laughed.
“Yes, yes, thank you, good day.”
Eventually he was out of site, and I never had the pleasure to see him again in Whole Foods.
Florida is a Conservative state; a Bible Belt state. Intermixed with the many northern snow birds and transplants such as myself, we have many Bible thumpers who are sympathetic to the old dogma. Reason and logic are vulnerable victims in religious zones. The religious fanatic wants to be left alone…left alone to proselytize and preach and spread misinformation wherever and whenever they want. The religious fundie doesn’t believe anyone else has the right to call them on the mat. The threat of secular humanism and science to their delicate myth makes them feel persecuted, and there are many times I’m sure they are persecuted. But they are only ever doing it to themselves, by insisting that tare the ones who have the right to dictate arbitrary and culturally relevant “truth”.
