the atheist and the rainbow
He is an quite an intelligent guy my atheist friend, however, when he sent me an e-mail with a superfluity of quotes and sagacious anecdotes on faith, I knew that he was up to something deeper. There's something in every atheist, itching to believe, and something in every believer, itching to doubt. That is what my atheist friend, let’s call him Patrick, told me.
When I first told him of my faith in Christianity, I told him that I was not a regular churchgoer but nevertheless a staunch believer. He quizzically looked at me and asked me how that was possible. “How do you become a sailor without going to the sea?” he asked, ostensibly to ridicule my philosophy of online or telekinetic Christianity as he called it. I did not have a better answer than to slip open my confused mouth and smile and look upwards as if to leave it all to some unseen source for clarification. Apart from his heathen flip side that set us slightly apart, Patrick is not a “bad” person, whatever that means. Okay, I mean, he does not steal anybody’s maize nor uproot any country’s railway. He is the quintessential modern bachelor, except he lacks faith and facial hair.
Having grown up in a home where church was encouraged but not forced, Patrick had attended Sunday school as a means to escape the routine drudgery that is school. He did not care much for the baby who was rescued from the waters of the Nile (even though he insists that Migingo will not secede to Uganda while he is still alive) or his fellow escapist, Jonah or his part-time misbeliever Saul or any of the other lesson-filled stories found in the good book. His idea of church was founded on escapism. As a child, he used it to run away from the chalk waving teachers and as a nonbelieving adult, he uses church to excuse himself from work, to pick up potential girlfriends and to escape paying taxes.
When he set out to find faith, Patrick did not believe that it existed, or that it could be found. He set out on a faithless mission to find faith just to prove me wrong, and he almost did. Even though my non-church-going self is not inspired enough to speak for the church, I went pious and waxed philosophical how it took the same amount of faith to be godless or a believer. As I spoke, I felt wiser, better than him and inspirational. This was my last shot at the ghost of atheism that had dwelt so long in my friend. I attacked it with holy verses. I jabbed at it with pugnacious prayers. I struck it with pithy discussions. Eventually, he (Patrick, not the ghost) looked at me with dead eyes and an unrelenting smile with one wave of his hands, dismissed me and told me to shut up; he’d heard it all before. I faithfully obliged.
With that, his journey to find faith began, yet he still claimed that we believers were not far from being insane, if not an outright bunch of ignorant idiots. To my self-righteous self, Patrick’s was an imbecilic quest to seek faith because he had the strongest and unwavering of presumptions from the beginning that he was not going to find it. Hoping to strike a pot of gold, he followed the atheist’s rainbow, up the arch and down the slope. What he found at the end of the rainbow was a goose instead, the same goose that has been laying golden eggs for him for six years now. When I heard of his business ventures, I sought the story of his journey.
So, on his journey, he met all calibres of clergymen. He told me of men-of-the-cloth whose clothes could feed him for a decade, and of generous priests whose food handouts made them hungry for more flock, of flamboyant pastors who preyed on his infidelity and threatened him with horrific stories about hell and eternal damnation. He played the part of the confessional sinner and wept, wailed and spoke in spasmodic gasps and when he was ready to enjoy his golden eggs, he was happily baptized and trained in the art of using the church as a tax-exempt ladder to social and corporate wellbeing.
He owns a church, not for the faithful and not by faith, for business. Patrick is now a corporate pastor in Nairobi. It has been six years since he established his ministry, that’s his goose. Even though he dresses like the rainbow he once chased, colorful suits and shiny cars, his sense of the expensive and tasty is inexplicably exotic. His hedonistic indulgence in “things of the world” is well documented in his memory as he told me of countless women, businesses and families that he had, in his own words, “torn apart”, he says this with a victorious smile and the cockiness of a tall, dark and handsome Luhya. From the prohibited ivory to the rare gold, the threaded linen to the threadless satin, his world is a now a royal mix of soft and shiny, illicit and legal and above all a blend of faith and doubt. He is still the same old atheist inside, with a staunch belief in the weaknesses of humanity.
He professes to be a believer, but only to his Christian congregation whom he has a blessed stranglehold on. Even though his congregation is very wary of his expensive lifestyle, inexorable girl chasing and reckless drinking, the bon vivant has a growing following in his church; they follow him wherever he goes like hungry sheep would follow a grassy wolf. “They want what I have”, he tells me.
“How do you live with all this, a life of lies and treachery?” I asked him. He smiled, looked straight at me and with his fake bucolic accent, he explained how his calling to be an atheistic and self-serving “man of faith” was nothing worse than a teacher who does not believe in what she is teaching, or a builder who does not believe in the strength of his cornerstone, or the doctor who administers a drug while at the same time counting the hours before the patient dies. I looked at him, gave him a sardonic nod and prodded him on.
“It’s the same twisted thing my friend, you believe but don’t act, I don’t believe but I act.” He told me as he rose to leave for the evening sermon before the evening drink.
"There is a thin line between truth and fiction. This is that line."
When I first told him of my faith in Christianity, I told him that I was not a regular churchgoer but nevertheless a staunch believer. He quizzically looked at me and asked me how that was possible. “How do you become a sailor without going to the sea?” he asked, ostensibly to ridicule my philosophy of online or telekinetic Christianity as he called it. I did not have a better answer than to slip open my confused mouth and smile and look upwards as if to leave it all to some unseen source for clarification. Apart from his heathen flip side that set us slightly apart, Patrick is not a “bad” person, whatever that means. Okay, I mean, he does not steal anybody’s maize nor uproot any country’s railway. He is the quintessential modern bachelor, except he lacks faith and facial hair.
Having grown up in a home where church was encouraged but not forced, Patrick had attended Sunday school as a means to escape the routine drudgery that is school. He did not care much for the baby who was rescued from the waters of the Nile (even though he insists that Migingo will not secede to Uganda while he is still alive) or his fellow escapist, Jonah or his part-time misbeliever Saul or any of the other lesson-filled stories found in the good book. His idea of church was founded on escapism. As a child, he used it to run away from the chalk waving teachers and as a nonbelieving adult, he uses church to excuse himself from work, to pick up potential girlfriends and to escape paying taxes.
When he set out to find faith, Patrick did not believe that it existed, or that it could be found. He set out on a faithless mission to find faith just to prove me wrong, and he almost did. Even though my non-church-going self is not inspired enough to speak for the church, I went pious and waxed philosophical how it took the same amount of faith to be godless or a believer. As I spoke, I felt wiser, better than him and inspirational. This was my last shot at the ghost of atheism that had dwelt so long in my friend. I attacked it with holy verses. I jabbed at it with pugnacious prayers. I struck it with pithy discussions. Eventually, he (Patrick, not the ghost) looked at me with dead eyes and an unrelenting smile with one wave of his hands, dismissed me and told me to shut up; he’d heard it all before. I faithfully obliged.
With that, his journey to find faith began, yet he still claimed that we believers were not far from being insane, if not an outright bunch of ignorant idiots. To my self-righteous self, Patrick’s was an imbecilic quest to seek faith because he had the strongest and unwavering of presumptions from the beginning that he was not going to find it. Hoping to strike a pot of gold, he followed the atheist’s rainbow, up the arch and down the slope. What he found at the end of the rainbow was a goose instead, the same goose that has been laying golden eggs for him for six years now. When I heard of his business ventures, I sought the story of his journey.
So, on his journey, he met all calibres of clergymen. He told me of men-of-the-cloth whose clothes could feed him for a decade, and of generous priests whose food handouts made them hungry for more flock, of flamboyant pastors who preyed on his infidelity and threatened him with horrific stories about hell and eternal damnation. He played the part of the confessional sinner and wept, wailed and spoke in spasmodic gasps and when he was ready to enjoy his golden eggs, he was happily baptized and trained in the art of using the church as a tax-exempt ladder to social and corporate wellbeing.
He owns a church, not for the faithful and not by faith, for business. Patrick is now a corporate pastor in Nairobi. It has been six years since he established his ministry, that’s his goose. Even though he dresses like the rainbow he once chased, colorful suits and shiny cars, his sense of the expensive and tasty is inexplicably exotic. His hedonistic indulgence in “things of the world” is well documented in his memory as he told me of countless women, businesses and families that he had, in his own words, “torn apart”, he says this with a victorious smile and the cockiness of a tall, dark and handsome Luhya. From the prohibited ivory to the rare gold, the threaded linen to the threadless satin, his world is a now a royal mix of soft and shiny, illicit and legal and above all a blend of faith and doubt. He is still the same old atheist inside, with a staunch belief in the weaknesses of humanity.
He professes to be a believer, but only to his Christian congregation whom he has a blessed stranglehold on. Even though his congregation is very wary of his expensive lifestyle, inexorable girl chasing and reckless drinking, the bon vivant has a growing following in his church; they follow him wherever he goes like hungry sheep would follow a grassy wolf. “They want what I have”, he tells me.
“How do you live with all this, a life of lies and treachery?” I asked him. He smiled, looked straight at me and with his fake bucolic accent, he explained how his calling to be an atheistic and self-serving “man of faith” was nothing worse than a teacher who does not believe in what she is teaching, or a builder who does not believe in the strength of his cornerstone, or the doctor who administers a drug while at the same time counting the hours before the patient dies. I looked at him, gave him a sardonic nod and prodded him on.
“It’s the same twisted thing my friend, you believe but don’t act, I don’t believe but I act.” He told me as he rose to leave for the evening sermon before the evening drink.
"There is a thin line between truth and fiction. This is that line."
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