Reed Secular Alliance

Letters from a Barbed Wire Monastery – Actual Conversations

By:  “Prison Bob”

The Inmate Behind Bars

I was sitting quietly, politely, and demurely on my bunk the other day when out of nowhere, a Messianic Jew/Seventh Day Adventist/Charismatic whom I psychologically scramble from time to time approached me.  “I don’t mean to cause a debate or anything, but why don’t you read these (scriptures); they explain EXACTLY how I feel about faith.”

I’ll call him Confused from here on out.  It’s okay, I call him that to his face.  The easiest way to stay safe around here is to NOT say anything behind a person’s back that you wouldn’t to their face.  So, Confused had read a diatribe of mine concerning faith, which I believe Leslie has wisely sequestered [Leslie Zukor rejected a couple of rants from Prison Bob].  He handed me a scrap of paper with “Romans 14:22 and 14:23″ on it.  “I don’t mean to cause a debate but…!”  It’s always someone’s “but” hanging out that starts these things.

14:22 says, “So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God.”  Wow!  That is advice he should have heeded.  14:22 continues with:  “Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves.”  Okay.  14:23 states:  “But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith, and everything that does not come from faith is sin.” 

My first thought was “What the “@#k!?” (That actually meant heck, but I thought it was more colorful that way.)  Then, I took a moment, let the blood pressure recede, and went to the beginning of the paragraph (always a good idea when dealing with rabid theists) and found my rebuttal for poor delusional Confused.  Romans 14:19, which reads:  “Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and mutual edification.”

I approached Confused and proceeded to ask — “Why would you give me ammo like that?”  Did he feel that I was a god to be confided in?  The conversation degenerated from there.  Down through semantic variences of differing Bible versions and their choice inclusions we tumbled, landing at his unfounded Catholic Conspiracy Theory.  We could have fed for hours on that, but I asked him if he proselytized.  That stopped him tead like a tazer to the sweetmeats.  Is that, I inquired keeping “it” between himself and he god?

If you haven’t guessed by now, I get a WHOLE LOT of “that’s not what I meant!”  To which I reply, “Well, it is what you said.”  They hate that.  And, just so you know, I don’t buy into EVERY opportunity to argue, here are some actual statements I passed up while writing this this morning.  I “learned” 1)  The USA and Canada are separate continents.  2) England is not an island.  3) New England no longer exists (Part of USA).  4) Australia is not a continent, however, it is an island.  And last but not least, I was asked when the last leap year was.  Asker had NO CLUE Presidential elections occur on leap years.

My cell mate told me I should refrain from judging people for inanities (my word) like the above, because at 48-years-old, he didn’t know England was an Island.  But he wants to go there someday.  I broke and asked him if he would know he was there if he went.  Truth is honestly stranger than fiction, or so it appears.  And no, I made not of those up.  I know.  It’s sad.  Education!  Education!  Education!  Without it, society dies!