A Shame...

In high school while taking journalism as well as writing and editing for the school's paper, I became friendly with a classmate named John. (Who was also eerily similar to my dad--same dress sense, modes of speech, and even nearly identical glasses frames.) He also happened to be a real hardcore Bible-humping near-fundamentalist Christian. We weren't friends, but we were friendly, but the fact that we got on as well as we did always strikes me as surprising. I don't generally get along with really religious people and my views on religion were pretty much the same then, only less critical.

John and I would chat in class (we were allowed to!!) and these chats often became theistic/scientific debates. I was never trying to convert him--nor was he trying to convert me--but was interested in how he viewed the world. He wasn't fiercely skeptical of science, and knew more about the details than most mouth-frothing religious loons. The two seem so diametrically opposed to me (and still does) and I was genuinely interested in hearing how he squared the two.

Even when our debates grew heated--as they occasionally did--our relationship stayed the same. He was just a genuinely nice guy, and very intelligent. His religious beliefs held him back sometimes though--I got the feeling that he might have had an inkling that his beliefs were on shaky ground. Which is a shame.

Now, John had a terrific radio voice--just that articulate, clear, even, hard-to-define thing that makes a voice so commercial-sounding. This combined with his intellect could have taken him a long way. Since we weren't friends, though, we never spoke again after graduation.

A couple of years ago I discovered a series of creationist Christian propaganda videos attacking evolution. They were done in Flash animation with a male voiceover, and the second I heard the voice I immediately thought of John. It sounded just like him. (He had a very distinct sort of low softness in his speech that sorta stuck out. There were no credits that I could see so I've no idea who the narrator really was, but if it's John part of me will be disappointed. I knew he was about as likely to change his mind about his beliefs as I was (read: when pigs fly down to play ice hockey with the devil), but part of me had hoped that maybe one day he might at least come to terms with the opposing assertions of science and the bible. Funnily enough, evolution wasn't something I remember him saying he disagreed with. He never said he agreed with it, either, so it could go either way.


John liked me enough that he asked me to sign his yearbook. I left two words, words I think everyone should consider:


Question everything.