I can tell you’re a freethinker

Today is a public holiday; I spent a good part of it with my MUN kids at a training session. The conference is this week end and I’ve told everyone who’s asked – I’m knee deep in policy double talk.

On our way today, in my car, the subject of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code came up among the chatter from the girls in the back seat. One quipped that the book was “blasphemous” and that Brown “writes lies”. In hindsight I should have just let it slide. After all, these are 13 and 14 year olds regurgitating adult opinions and perhaps one day they may be mature enough to form their own thoughts on things. But… I jumped on that quicker than you can say ‘dogmatic brainwashing’.

I asked the girl what she meant by her remarks. Fair to say that her response is the usual ones you’ve heard — and if you’ve heard the same stuff that I’ve heard then you know that these accusations about Brown’s work of fiction mostly come off as insecure and/or misinformed.

I offered my opinion that people are making too much out of a novel and that if someone could have their belief system shaken by a fictional tale then we’ve got ourselves a bigger problem than a writer making fanciful posits on the life of Christ. Why, I asked, do we have such low opinions of our fellow human beings? Why do we think that people are all empty vessels in danger of being filled with, and only with, seditious thoughts that will throw world order into chaos or, in this case, make those of us who read the Code some sort of infidels who will most assuredly burn in hell for even thinking that Jesus got hitched? I also wanted to know if she thought that the Harry Potter series was blasphemous. I didn’t actually get a response to that. Instead I got a sweet-but-poisonous “I can tell you’re a freethinker.” Whatever the hell freethinker means, she said it like it was a dirty word. And you all know how much I hate to be labeled a something-something.

I knew then it was time to let the subject drop.

It was an interesting exchange that made me realise how frightfully intolerant we are raising our children to be. These are the sane ones, the ones who won’t incite riots in the face of a blasphemous cartoon and yet, they sound just as ignorant if not a tad bigoted when they say things like that.

I believe that the girls’ opinion of me has changed in that short moment in the car. I am no longer a harmless teacher but a ‘freethinker’ with an agenda of godlessness, perhaps, and who spent too much time in that crazy liberal America (ok, everybody laugh now). I also know that if I didn’t speak up then nobody in the next few years in their life will so let me be the odd ball as long as I stood up for the things I believe in.

If I indulge in a hubristic moment I can perhaps hope that some of what I said stuck to their narrow minded noggins and pray that it will gnaw at them.

Yeah, not a snow’s chance in hell.

** Just one more thing about The Da Vinci Code: it’s a work of fiction, people. Lighten the hell up. Every few years we’ve one film or another that makes the ‘religious’ group go up in arms over what some heretic has done to the image of Christ and Christianity. The book poses as much threat to Christianity as The Last Temptation of Christ did in the 80′s or Dogma in the 90′s, i.e. NONE.