Lunching Alone, Mentally

I OFTEN EAT LUNCH with folks of the conservative sort. They bring the whole package, Trump, Christ, guns, and the rest. They eschew science, of course, in their myopic world in which human evolution by natural selection and climate change are but rumors, and belief in them paves one's road to hell. Around my kitchen table sit these neighbors, espousing nonsense, while I listen, and smile pleasantly. As Mark Twain said of foolishness: they would drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience. If the Bible don't say nuthin' 'bout evolution, and it sure as hell don't, they aint no evolution." Smugly, their case is closed, their minds more closed. How comforting it must be to dwell in a fictional world in which all worthwhile knowledge and wisdom is contained within the covers of a collection of bloody, barbaric ancient manuscripts. A "harsh", mass murdering deity brings certainty, hence contentment. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me. How many other Gods are there, God? My silence they misconstrue as agreement, rather than contempuous tolerance. Let them. "Coninued tolerance ought to lead to ultimate acceptance. Continued tolerance is an insult" (Goethe). My silent tolerance is my tacit insult, unspoken. My sweet sister just loves these nice, neighborly folks, the lunches, my lovely home. Their racism and religious nonsense, Trumpism, misogyny, (woman must be subordinate to man), and all the rest she conveniently, expediently ignores, for the sake of harmony, chit chatty fun, smiles. A lunch friend recounts that years ago he and his wife and kids walked out of a Pentecostal church service when the new pastor turned out, horror of horrors, to be a woman! I refrained to ask whether he and his kids handled any poisonous snakes on their way out the door, as proof of their faith in their vengeful Biblical God. Intergenerational Biblical misogyny. Teach your children well. (Neil Young). Hatred and idiocy are easily concealed behind smiles and pleasantries. I can do without the smmiles and charm, but cannot, will not overloook the monstrosities. Anyone who actually believes in "hell", and dismissively consigns billions of good people to eternal damnation in it merely for having diverse religious beliefs is..what.....hateful? Mentally ill? I tell my sister that among the most charming, personable people in history is Adolf Hitler. She seems uninterested. She might have had a pleasant chat with Hitler, the vegetarian tea totler who lived on both barbituates and amphetamines. She might rejoin that Hitler's evil was actively destructive, and that my lunch guests' beiefs harm no one. I might beg to differ. Mind foreruns all conditions, said Buddha, a small statue of which sis has in her large, well manicured back yard. Beliefs precipitate action. Even as we sip or communal coffee, there is, somewhere, a gay or transgender human being suffering the Shakespearian slings and arrows of outrageous, vengeful religious beliefs.