My Job: Forced Evangelization

Working for the Church has some interesting side effects.  For example, when going out on the weekends, conversations with new people go a lot like this:

Mr. Attractive Man: Hello

Me: Hello

(blah...blah...blah...)

Mr. Attractive Man: So what do you do?

Me: Oh, I work for the diocese.

Mr. Attractive Man: Oh, does that mean your Catholic?

Me: Uh, yep.

Mr. Attractive Man: Oh, like hard-core Catholic?

Me: Yep, the sign of the cross and everything.

Mr. Attractive Man:  Well, I think that we should all be open to other religions.

Me:  I just want to seek the truth.

Mr. Attractive Man:  Love is my religion.

Me: Interiorly: hahahahahaha...because, out of context, it sounds like an awesome pick up line; Exteriorly: Oh?

Mr. Attractive Man:  Yeah, have you ever heard the song "Love is My Religion" by Ziggy Marley?  That has some good lyrics....


If only we had met at another time, another place....then maybe I could try to discuss how weak his statement , "Love is my religion" seems. 

Of course we were probably working with different definitions of "love" and "religion", but as I understand it, religion is under the virtue of justice because we, as creatures, owe worship to our creator.  Who does this man offer worship to?  Noone in particular...just an abstract concept.  Ziggy, himself, says, "I don't condemn, I don't convert,...noone is gonna lose their soul."

And then we come to love.  Love is to will the good of another for his or her own sake.  I am assuming that this man just meant that we should aim for peace, harmony, and compassion, but that taken alone is very dangerous.  If to love is to will the good of another, but we do not have Truth guiding our love, then how do we know what the other person's good is?  I think that this is an important discussion to have as we are seeing the implications of this thought in our society.  Euthanasia is one example: we have one side claiming that it is more loving [compassionate] to allow suicide while the other side says that this allowance of suicide goes against moral law.  This means that my blog post discussion about this issue is not simply a way of me trying to attempt to have some form of dominance over another person's thought, but it is an honest attempt for dialogue.

As Christians, we believe that God is love...this religion of love that was explained to me simply removes the God of the Christians because it is more tolerant to forget a God than to offend someone else's God. 

Nonetheless, I think we can find a certain simplicity in this religion of love. As Ziggy Marley says, "I don't want to fight, hey let's go fly a kite."  And as I always say, "Who doesn't love flying kites?"