Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [20]
Suddenly, I shit you not, the Texan, who had been listening to all this with one eye on the Monday Night Football broadcast on the TV over the bar, asked the young Muslim, “But you have accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, have you not?” It was unclear whether the Texan meant all Muslims or our young friend specifically, but that distinction hardly seemed to matter. I will spare you the painful recitation of the ensuing conversation except to say that the young man showed grace, poise, patience, and the eloquence one can only achieve through repetition, as he explained that Mohammed, not Christ, was at the center of his faith. Listening to this and seeing they were at an impasse, I bought us another round and brought in my favorite mediator, quoting him as best I could, saying, “Gandhi suggested that these are all just different paths leading to the same place, right?”
Simultaneously and without hesitation, the Muslim from Kuwait and the born-again Christian from Texas, and my pal Gordo, to whom I had been telling this story by way of illustration, all replied, “No, they are not.”
I answered Gordo the same way I answered my friends at the bar, “Then the only outcome of that view is war.”
Gordo is a good and fast talker and his silences are almost always meant to imply a readiness to listen. We have been friends, enemies, partners, adversaries, and drinking buddies. He wants me to drag him into a loftier exchange than the one I had with those two men at the bar in Toronto. So I ramble on about the human impulse to mythologize what is a natural proclivity for abstract thought, and my view that, as far as mankind has come since the Enlightenment, it wouldn’t take much of a collapse in the progress of Reason to plunge humanity into another Dark Age. For me, that was the real danger behind Reagan’s abandonment of education and his lending political legitimacy to his evangelical supporters.
Gordo has more faith than I in the resiliency of the idea of progress and the strength of the status quo, but is willing to hear me out. I suggest that, historically, times aren’t always as flush as they have been in post-WWII America, the era in which our attitudes were formed; that in ideologically uncertain times, rational cosmological curiosities devolve into irrational, primitive suppositions, and our hopes and fears step in to fill the gaps in our thinking, thereby flirting with a dangerous cultural formula for a return to barbarism. In other words we create, at times, mythologies to get at the heart of the heretofore unexplainable; we create superstitions to compensate for our ignorance.
“So you’re saying that God is either a myth or a superstition?” Gordo asks wearily, very nearly doing that TV thing of summing up what someone is saying by throwing some of their own words back at them. I’m not biting.
“Well, I think that, historically, institutions have attempted to anthropomorphize the concept of God into some sort of politically viable entity.” I add that superstition has played a role in setting comprehensible, if false, limits in the world. Because current knowledge and the ability to hypothesize will only take the observer so far out in space and time before he or she becomes lost and must seek to grope his or her way back to familiar territory. A territory to which, once having left, ideologically speaking, there is really no return.
“A point of no return, like Eden,” he says, sounding truly glum.
“A point of no return can be a good thing, too. Do we want to return to inquisitions and holocausts?”
I can hear Gordo scratching his beard on the other end of the phone. A good sign. Gordo is a videotape editor and so it is his job to take long swaths of images and cut them into quick, snappy little phrases. In fact, I can hear him clicking buttons on his tape console as we speak. I can also hear him taking chunks of ice into his mouth from a plastic cup and crunching them loudly right in my ear.