Dialogue with a wandering bible

An interesting thing happened to me today. I was walking around campus with 45 minutes to kill before class when a man came up to me and offered me a pamphlet with a bunch of religious rhetoric on it. He asked if he could talk to me, and I told him "No, I have to get to class." So I walked away, grabbed something to drink, sat down next to a pond and started to daze out when I saw him come up next to me. "Uhh..." I said.

"Can I talk to you now?" He replied.

Feeling pretty shitty for lying, I said yes and let him talk for 30 minutes about the spirit and the soul. "We have spirits," he said "because we worship. This is the difference between us and animals. You don't see animals worshiping, do you? Exactly, this is why we have spirits."

A bit confused with his logic, I started to daze off, nodding my head every once and a while in order to avoid being rude.

"Do you sin?" He asked.

"I lied to you didn't I?" I replied, feeling foolish again, but instantly regretting the fact that I just reinforced his overzealous behavior.

"That's because you have not let God into your spirit." He concluded. "Do you want to let God into your spirit?"

"Um..." I muttered. "Have you ever heard of logical positivism? It's a philosophy of science where you rule out all things metaphysical and theological because they cannot be directly observed or measured. That's how I feel about the spirit; I can't see it, feel it, or measure it. Therefore I cannot recognize it."

"Science, is important in some aspects," he replied. "But I don't need science to tell me about the universe, because everything is orderly because God created it that way. What science does is deter us from finding God. It makes us blind to the connection between the spirit and the Holy Ghost. Not to bash your studies, of course. Do you have plans for your future?"

"Yes," I said.

"What?"

"Well, I would like to go to graduate school, and possibly get my PhD if I don't burn out."

"PhD in what?"

"In science: behavior analysis."

"Oh, well does that future include letting God into your heart?" he asked.

"If by God, you mean Science." I replied.

And that was pretty much the end of it. He wrote his name and phone number on a piece of paper, handed to me, and begged for me to get in contact with him. I shook his hand and smiled as he walked away. I trotted off to class to find that I got an A- on my Anthropology paper (much better than I had hopped for). After class, I went to the library, opened my text book, and studied my beloved religion: the science of the study of human behavior. To each his own, to each his own...