Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Last week I was watching television in my apartment when I heard a knock on my door. Peeking out the window before answering the door, I noticed two men dressed in suits standing in my muddy driveway. I approached the door with caution and upon opening it a bit I noticed that the men weren’t government officials, lawyers or investigators. They were door-to-door religion peddlers.
Unlike the other men in suits I mentioned, religion peddlers don’t pack a punch, they just irritate you. Here’s your SAT analogy: Door to door religion : men in suits :: black flies : stinging insects.
For the fourth time this year I politely accepted literature designed to “save my soul” and politely discarded it in the kitchen trash can.
A few days later I was frantically typing a paper in the Union computer cluster when I was approached by a man in a gorilla suit (this is no joke, or play on words…read this literally: A man(?) in a gorilla suit.) Gorilla Boy was handing out invitations to an anti-Darwin lecture on campus that was sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ. I recognized the group as the same people who had been flooding the letters to the editor folder on FirstClass with their thoughts on our institution teaching evolution.
Although Gorilla Boy interrupted my attempt to frantically finish an anthropology (irony?) paper, I remained calm. Like I often have in the past, I decided to take my issue public with an opinion column. As I write this, I am overcome with feelings of deja vu.
It was this time last spring that I wrote an article condemning local religious groups for pamphleteering my car with “You’re gonna burn in hell” literature. This year they have forgone the politeness of avoiding me and instead peddled their beliefs face to face with circus tricks and cheap suits.
Okay, okay, I understand. Creationist religion is threatened by a fossil record that tears apart their belief system, their framework. But let’s be serious for a minute … monkey costumes and scare tactics designed to shame us into church? Give me a break, is this 1930s Tennessee?
Some of us, myself included, believe in fossil evidence. Some of us are even here to study it. How would students react if those of us who believe in the tenets of natural selection and survival of the fittest dressed up like Jesus and handed out pamphlets proclaiming “Organized religion contains no fact.”
I believe that faith is a tremendously important and a tremendously personal thing. I ,for one, am not impressed by scare tactics, parlor tricks and the like. To those reading this: Kindly take your beliefs out of my face. Hang on to your brochures and your magazines, I don’t want them, I don’t need them and I’m not interested.
Kris Healey is a senior anthropology major.
