ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

A girl I used to be friends with used to refer to really pushy, obnoxious Christians as “Christ Packers”. I guess the idea was, they want to pack your every orifice chock full o’ Jesus. Hence, Christ Packers. The reason I even bring it up is, I’m back in school. And I’m taking online classes since I have a heavy travel schedule. And when I went to school before, one of my predominant experiences was that in every single online class I ever took, there was always one Christ Packer, like no matter what.

I’m not talking about the person who simply loves life and loves God and Jesus and wants everybody to be happy and tries to be good and just get along with their fellow people. No, no. I’m fine with those people. I’m not religious whatsoever due to my Christian fundamentalist upbringing, but I don’t mind this other mild, happy brand of Christianity that much. I mean, I’m almost one of them, just minus the loving God and Jesus part. That just doesn’t happen to be my bag, that’s all. The person I’m talking about is the one who finds a way to insert some obnoxious religious pretext into every single conversation, no matter how unrelated, and they use it as an excuse to feel morally superior and to be hateful toward people who don’t live by their supposed Christian ideal. I’m talking about the kind of person who you could ask them don’t they just love Juicy Fruit chewing gum and they would reply, “Not as much as I love The Lord Jesus Christ.” And you can even hear them capitalizing Every Single Letter the way they say it.

Anyway, like every other damn online class I’ve ever taken, there is one of these Christ Packers in my English 101 class. The teacher asked us to share three things about ourselves:

Hello, first, I’am a born again believer and follower of my Lord Jesus Christ. Second, I strongly dislike thunderstorms that have the ability to produce tornados. Third, I taught my second cousin how to play chess and now he is a state champion in Kansas.

I find this kind of obnoxious when the very first thing they think is relevant to any topic is The Lord Jesus Christ, but I am working on trying to be tolerant of other people, so I try not to be too annoyed about this type of thing. Of course, like any dedicated Christ Packer, he brings up TLJC every time he says anything longer than a sentence or so. On our most recent paper we were supposed to post a rough draft of a dialogue addressing an important conversation we’d had or overheard. He writes a long-winded description of how his dad left their family and he and his mother had to move into subsidized housing and they could not take their dog with them, so it was even sadder because he lost his father and his dog at the same time. I could relate, because that would be a miserable thing to have to go through as a kid. But then he tacks this on the end:

Here I was in a new house without my dad and without my dog. How in the world could this ever be consider a home. The awkward silence that filled the house that night confirmed the thought the had been running through my mind the whole day. That thought was the family that I was once apart of was over and done.
That feeling of over and done started where that conversation about my dog ended and lasted until the great Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ came in to my heart and took all the past pain and hurt away. But, thats another more important conversation.

If this had been a thread all through the story, it would have made sense, or if it had been integrated in any way at all, it would have been fine. But it just seems so out of place and awkward here. I really think it has nothing at all to do with his story, and everything to do with the fact that he has this driving need to just constantly remind everyone else of how much more righteous he is than they are. Then Sunday we were supposed to post our prewriting exercises for the next assignment. One of the topics he is considering for the “remembered event” paper is:

Standing in downtown Colombus Ohio, The Reformation, led by Pastor Rod Parsley, standing in opposition to a pro homosexual agenda, to preserve the sanctity of a holy union between a man and a woman called marriage.

I’m not living up to my self-imposed moral atheist standard very well by admitting this, but I am essentially now on a mission to antagonize this zealotous horse’s ass while pretending to be totally innocent. When I saw his post, I made sure one of my potential topics for the next paper was along the lines of “How I began to question my faith”, because I suspected he would hate that topic. I wrote a blurb about my fundamentalist childhood and how it made me realize that I am just not that type of person. Another one of my classmates, a girl who is Christian but open-minded, wrote commenting that she thought my remarks were very interesting and she’d like to hear more if that was the topic I chose. I used that opportunity to write back:

Thanks for your comments. I usually feel like kind of the odd one out when it comes to religion. I tried for years to fit in and be a good Christian, but in the end I am just not really cut out for it. Maybe it’s that my early experiences were negative like that, or maybe I really am just not suited for being a religious person, but I more or less decided that it was not for me. I don’t think I’m qualified to make the call on whether there is or isn’t a God, but I decided that I can still live a good, moral life even if I don’t pray and go to church like most people around here do. So I guess you could say that I try to observe many of the principles of Christianity, but without the Christianity part.

Ha, ha! If I unfailingly play the peaceful, loving and accepting moral Atheist card, he will look like the unreasonable one if he ever actively engages me! Now I just have to find a natural segue to work in something somewhere about loving gay people or finding anti-homosexual people offensive. Even though what I really want to do is post in response to him and say something antagonistic like, “Can you discuss the anti-gay protest in a little more detail? I don’t agree with you or anything. I just want to know more about your unreasonable hatred for fellow humans.”