automaticable

A friend and I were talking the other day and she started telling me about a trip her and some friends took to a haunted house. Not the kind on Halloween, but the tourist attraction type. While they were in the house, one of the people there started talking about how they could feel the presence of the spirits and that she may have physically been touched by something while she was in there. My friend commented about how ridiculous that was and how silly her friend was for saying anything like that. At that point an interesting sequence of thoughts ran through my head, in this order:

1. Why was this ridiculous? It is just someone’s thoughts and feelings about the paranormal. They could be just as real as anything else, we just don’t know.
2. Wait, my friend thinks this is ridiculous because her religious beliefs tell her it is ridiculous. For ghosts and spirits to exist that can physically touch you, Christianity would have to be false, and therefore any beliefs in the paranormal are obviously ridiculous.
3. Doesn’t she realize that non-believers consider her devout faith in God, Jesus, and the Bible equally ridiculous, since it is based on the same amount of fact as ghosts and other paranormal beings?
4. How would I be treated if I laughed about my close friends who have faith in Christianity and called them ridiculous in public. Why is it OK for people to mock minority belief systems, but it is blasphemous (and nearly criminal in the South) to do the same about Christianity?

I don’t think I would necessarily call my friend’s judgements (which aren’t isolated to just her) hypocrisies, I think of it more as ignorance. Although ignorance has a negative connotation, what else do you call it when someone doesn’t realize their own shortcomings? Anyway, moving past that, this actually helped me realize something about myself. Because I am 1) non-religious, and 2) socially liberal, I feel like I have fostered a highly non-judgmental character, and am very proud of that. My first instinct when I hear about someone’s beliefs is not to ridicule or stereotype them, but to accept their beliefs as just another facet of their character. While Christianity (and most other religions) preach about acceptance of others, I am much happier actually living that acceptance instead of merely preaching it.

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