Skip to main content

For god's sake, leave us alone!

To get home after work I have the choice of two buses; No 12 and No 171. Both will take me to about 2 minutes walk from where I live but for some reason I prefer to catch 171. I was therefore quite happy tonight, when after about 5 min of waiting, I saw a 171 appear at the horizon. I got on board, find myself a free seat on the upper deck, whipped out the book I am currently reading (Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris) and readied myself for enjoying the next 20 minutes or so, far from the madding crowd, as on many other evenings.
Alas! It wasn't to be. A few hundred metres down the road, I was pulled out of my story by a male voice on my right singing its own version of Amazing Grace. You meet those people from time to time in London, most of the time some decrepit rasta singing reggae; they sing out loud and you are never really sure why they are doing it: is it that the light missing on certain floors or do they expect to be discovered by a producer and start a career? I was reflecting that this latter possibility was not very likely on a bus and even less so in the part of the city we were in as I was getting ready to go back to my book. I clicked my tongue to show my dissatisfaction. I was looking at the man at the time. He seemed noticed me from the corner of his eye and immediately raised the volume of his singing. I tried to return to my reading anyway. After all I have been used to reading in noisy environments since school. This time it wasn't happening however. I decided to bide my time and see whether the man would stop after that song or perhaps get off at the next stop. The bus was by now almost full.
After a while, he did indeed stop and I breathed a sigh of relief. A short lived sigh of relief. The next thing I knew the man, in a rather emphatic way, a bit like an actor saying his lines, was telling us about god.... How he had decided to love him and how god had decided to grant him salvation in return. I glazed over pretty quickly but did catch the word "love" (or is it "Love"?) being repeated several times. I tried again to ignore the man and to go back to my reading. To no avail. Slowly but surely, my temper, usually rather unflappable, came to boiling point. Several times, I thought about interrupting him and asking him politely to desist but did not do anything about it probably out of cowardice. After about ten minutes of this, I just could not take any more. I shut my book, put it back into my bag and got up to get off the bus at the coming next stop. As I was coming down the stairs, I glared at the man one last time. I met his gaze as he was still talking: did I imagine a sparkle of mockery?
I took the next bus, which fortunately arrived quickly. Not so fortunately however, I could not go back to reading. I went on fuming for the next ten minutes of the trip home and here I am ranting about it now. I imagine the aim of this guy was to make some converts or at least to interest people to his saintly discours on love (sorry: Love). In my case (and was I really the only one?), it did not work at all. It actually had the completely opposite effect. The man was here to extol love but he only managed to raise anger and something verging on hate. I don't go about shouting my beliefs (whatever they are) over the rooftops (except, perhaps, this particular rooftop: Blogspot). Most people don't. Why do religious zealots feel the need to do just that? What can't they stick to their beliefs and keep all those marvellous discoveries of theirs to themselves? If I wanted to hear about them; if I wanted someone to tell me how to live my life, I would know where to find a church... It is those sort of practices which have spawned most of the violence the world has know: crusades, inquisition, forced conversions, jihad, terrorism (some of it), intolerance... Why can't people leave each other alone? I am not asking them to give up on their beliefs and thought; just that they stop shoving them down other people's throat. Is that too much to ask?
Religion was the topic of the day it seems!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comment here. Note that comments are moderated and only those in French or in English will be published. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and to leave a thought.

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
19 comments
Read more

pink sauce | life, with a pink seasoning

As of tonight, my blog Aimless Ramblings of Zefrog , that "place where I can vent my frustration, express ideas and generally open my big gob without bothering too many people" which will be 6 in a couple of months, becomes Pink Sauce . While the URLs zefrog.blogspot.com and www.zefrog.eu are still valid to access this page, the main URL now becomes www.pinksauce.co.uk. There is a vague plan to create a proper website for www.zefrog.eu to which the blog would be linked. Why Pink Sauce , you may ask. It is both simple and complicated. For several years, I have grown out of love for the name of the blog. It felt a bit cumbersome and clumsy. That said, I never really looked into changing it, seriously. Tonight, for dinner, I had pasta with a special pink sauce of my concoction ; single cream and ketchup. I know most people while feel nauseous at the very though of the mixture but trust me, it's gorgeous. Don't knock it till you've tried it. After having had my platte...
4 comments
Read more

Rev. Peter Mullen's Blog

Rev. Peter Mullen is the chaplain to the London Stock Exchange and the rector of St Michael's Cornhill and St Sepulchre without Newgate in the City. Rev. Peter Mullen was also until recently a blogger. Sadly the result of his cyber labour seem to have been deleted but Google has thankfully cached some of it and I have saved a copy for posterity, just in case. The deletion of Rev. Mullen's writings might just have something to do with the fact that last week, the Evening Standard and then the Daily Mail published an article (the same article actually) about some of those very writings (even though the elements of said writings being quoted had been published in June this year, at the time of the blessing ceremony which took place between two members of the Church of England in St Bartholomew the Great - picture ). In the article, we learned what the Rev. thinks about gay people and what should be done to them: We ["Religious believers"] disapprove of homosexuality ...
8 comments
Read more