Free Thinker

Not too long ago an acquaintance sent me a passive aggressive email about how great his religion is and daring me to pass it along if I 'didn't care what other people thought'.

Those afraid of being judged or hated or ridiculed he thought would be the 'strong' ones to pass it along.  But he never thought, those who do not agree, and who were not afraid of judgment, hatred, or ridicule from him, would choose not to pass it along.  Perhaps it was the arrogance of the assumption that what he had to say was so great and trying to 'trick' others into doing what he wanted was such an underhanded tactic.

So I wrote back to him.  If you don't care what your friends have to say, why choose to be friends with them?  True friends will look out for you and give you advice, wanted and unwanted, because they care.  If you did not think they cared, if you did not CARE that they cared, why do you have friends at all? 

I chose my friends carefully.  They will call me out on my actions if they think I'm wrong.  Their perspectives are different, but they do so because they care about me.  If I dismissed what they had to say, it means I think little of them as friends.  To me, that is wrong.  Great friends I hold onto because what they say and do are good and they help me be a better person.  And the guy who sent me the email was merely someone I met once in my life and had a rare correspondence with.  He never struck me as a genuine person because it seemed like, one day a month, he got some program to generate emails for him in reply to everyone in his inbox.  Sure he sort-of answered the emails, but not in a way like he read them.  More like a passing glance or misinterpretation.

Well, he definitely cared what I had to think, he just didn't care about the minor details such as what I was saying, just that I disagreed with his tactics and personally, I disagreed with many things in the overall literature in which he chose to pick out a few pretty lines.  Those lines didn't define the work as a whole and as a result, it would give the false impression that the work was, in my opinion, good, or that I agreed.

I said, thank you for thinking what you wrote was to help people, but I don't agree with the origins or the beliefs.  But in thank you, I give you a quote from another religion that is very wise,

"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."  -- Buddha

My acquaintance was absolute appalled that I would quote from Buddha.  How dare I remember something a scam artist and human turned idol to be worshipped said?  Despite what Buddha said making sense and the fact that my acquaintance knew nothing about Buddha, (and no, the guy didn't even read the quote either.  Just that I used something said in another religion offended the hell out of him.)

He responded with more passages from the work of his religion and how his god gave me free will but I'm choosing wrong by not following his word, (which pretty much aren't his god's words but rules and regulations cobbled together by a bunch of power hungry old men).  In addition, I am foolish to think that I could decide for myself what is right or wrong or that the morals I follow are decent, (since I didn't learn them from his religion, common sense and decency just doesn't exist in people who aren't of his ways).  To top it off, he added, if I did believe in his god, I would be living in paradise after death.  Wow, doesn't that sound dandy?

So, instead of trying to be a good person through opening my eyes and learning and doing good, and especially trying to be a good person, not for any reward, but just because I think that's the right way to live my life, is wrong?

There has to be a carrot at the end of the stick or threat of eternal torment? 

My email in response called him out on his hypocrisy and passive aggressive techniques to force his beliefs on me, and that he really didn't know anything about his religion at all.  I kept thinking of this great scene from 'Chicago', the movie, where Lucy Liu finds her lover in bed with another woman.  Her now ex-lover says, 'Are you going to believe what you see or believe what I tell you?'

I had the same feeling with this now former acquaintance.  Despite everything in history he was telling me to ignore the sins committed and ignored by his religion, and just believe my acquaintance when he says, 'my way is all good, now obey the rules that I preach.'

Well, here's another quote from the infamous Buddha:

"A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker."