Manifest

Jump to Comments

I had one of those frustrating traffic light conversations today. There was no escape. Scooter in front, car behind, and motorbike to my left. I clocked his approach in my mirror and contemplated weaving out of the box and jumping the red lights; the never-ending afternoon traffic crossing the Junghua/Chong-de intersection would have surely finished me off, but for a brief moment, it seemed to me to be the lesser of two evils. I didn’t do it though. Didn’t have the guts. He pulled up beside me, and the conversation began immediately, even though my gaze remained purposefully fixed on some distant point ahead.

Him: ‘Hey, how you doing?’

Me: ‘Oh, ok thanks’

Him: ‘Where you from?’

Me: ‘Iran’ (he either did not hear me correctly over the traffic noise, chose to ignore my churlishness, or just didn’t absorb it due to his preordained set of possible potential answers)

Him: ‘You a bushiban teacher?’

Me: ‘yep’

Him: ‘How’s your Chinese?’

Me: ‘mm’

Him: ‘do you meet very many missionaries?’

Me: (irritated not only by him, his religion, his clothes, his bicycle, his accent, his presence, his youth and his blind arrogance, but more by this scripted mantra they must teach, word-for-word, in Mormon school) ‘more than I would like’

Preliminaries. Always the same. He was like a bad lover, sticking a finger up a cavity and tweaking a nipple just because it is expected. He wasn’t interested in me at all; he didn’t care where I was from or what I was doing, or whether I could speak Chinese or not. He just wanted to get down to business, and once his token verbal foreplay was over and done with, he unzipped his pants and delivered the adolescent sweaty pounding that I knew was coming (no pun intended this time). ‘So’, he said with a smug, self-assured bucket of misplaced confidence in his own immortality, ‘do you have any special beliefs?’.

You know, these arseholes, they are so god-damned nice. Their shirts are so crisp and clean and nice, their hair is always neatly combed and never out of place even underneath their bicycle safety helmets and, even on the hottest, most stifling of Taiwanese summer days, there is never so much as a wet patch under their armpits, or a single bead of perspiration dripping from their well-formed, impressive, nice noses. The amount of times I have bitten my tongue, smiled and nodded politely out of respect and some kind of vague admiration for the mormon work ethic, is uncountable. But, my rage is always there; steaming just below the surface of my skin. It is a rage of intellectualism over faith, of good guest behaviour over arrogant superiority, and of a pure and unbridled nihilism over a bent, inconceivable theism. But, it’s more than that; it’s not only the improbability and fakery of institutional religious dogma that riles me, but the fact that it is only Christianity (a mere cult by historical measures) and it’s subsidiaries that behave in such an evangelical, pious, arrogant and elitist manner. How many times have you been approached by a Buddhist on the streets, extolling the value of transcendental meditation? How many Muslims have attempted to convert you into the Islamic life? How many Janists, Sikhs, Taoists, or even Jews come knocking on your door in the middle of your Sunday lunch? Not fucking many I would say. How many atheists, for that matter, go on rallying crusades to bolster their numbers? It’s Christianity and Christianity alone (with the possible exception of the Hare Krishnas); they are the cancer of institutional religion. An ugly, undesirable manifestation of a bloated, self-satisfied egomanical Western culture.

Those missionaries. It’s ok to hate them you know; it’s not like hating race, gender or sexuality for example. Missionaries are, by default, pious, arrogant, narrowminded and self-righteous without a single exception. Those qualities are the prerequisites of missionaryhood; if you do not embody these adjectives, then you are not missionary (in effect, you must believe that your religion is the best, your culture is the superior, and your language is the greatest, and you must be willing to inflict this on innocent people who are generally quite fond of their own culture to begin with). This kind of mind is very similar to the kind of mind that starts wars and erases generations, and, due to the nature of religious groups, all members must share this attitude. In their case, the stereotype is absolute and, because ‘tolerance’ is largely based on the fact that stereotypes are not manifest of a group, I can say ‘I hate them’, and it is beyond any kind of moral, liberal, or philospohical reproach.

I meant to reply with a bland and meaningless noncomittal answer to his question. Something not too direct, but carrying enough weight for him to get my implicit suggestion. But he caught me on a busy Tuesday on my way to the dentist, so I was already filled with a whole bag of Freudian dread at the prospect of some white-coated sonofabitch sticking a long pointy thing into my mouth. That poor fucker. I feel bad, ipso facto. Bad because I replied to his question on my beliefs by telling him pretty much what I just told you these last couple of paragraphs, except that my language was a little more colourful and suggestive.

When the lights turned to green, I revved my engine and screeched (as much as it is possible to screech on a gas bike) across the intersection. I clocked him again in my mirror; and this time, to make matters far, far worse, that nice, polite, articulate goddam niceguy fucking Mormon was smiling warmly and waving cheerfully.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Our Christian Heritage
• Europe Out Of Control, European Priorities
• Like the last few bars of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll

18 Comments

Filed under Rants, Taiwan