Spring is creeping into Oklahomistan. There's a hint of green everywhere you look, taking away some of the drab from the dreary. I'll be snuffling and sneezing soon. Something like 5 weeks left on my stay here. Eternity.

Since depression inevitably leads me to a bookstore, I'm now reading a book that's been on my list for a few years; Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. It's a chronicle of the craziness that is Mormonism. A quarter of the way through, I'm finding it very readable. I'd like to share a paragraph:

But such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by it's very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God—most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another. Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.

For the 10% of us that don't practice mythology, Krakauer is merely stating the obvious, which is why I find myself perpetually amazed at the average American Christian's unwillingness and seeming inability to follow that simple logic. Two or three times a week I get to listen to some scaredy-cat, Christian warmonger proclaiming the existential danger to Amurka presented by radical Islam. Occasionally, (snicker) I offer the opinion that, as an outsider looking in, what with the whole "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" mentality of most Christians, one mythology pretty much looks like the other to me.

My opinion is invariably met with scorn and a little spark of anger that usually burns down to a bizarre mixture of disbelief and condescension and even a little pity. Ironically, in a war between mutually exclusive beliefs about invisible cloud-daddies, it's often the rationalist who gets treated like he might be a little off in the head. But not always. Despite the human mind's immense capacity for self-delusion, that little spark of anger sometimes ignites a thoughtfulness that leads to a genuine exchange of ideas. Growth.