Caws Radio

I Love Christians

Yesterday morning I saw a student on campus wearing a Bad Religion t-shirt featuring a crossed-out cross, and I chuckled to myself at how effective a shirt it was. This little encounter provided an excellent contrast to that evening, in which I attended the Nation 2 Nation party with a couple of friends. Nation 2 Nation is a weekly little shindig put on by a small group of well-meaning Christians. Apparently, every Friday they invite a bunch of international students to their DAMN nice house and cook food and play games and such. I will admit right now, I agreed to go because #1: there was a promise of free food, and #2: there were Japanese students coming.

Being close to Holloween, the organizers thought it would be "fun" to make a bunch of construction-paper masks and force everyone to wear them. I immediately saw the opportunity for an Eyes Wide Shut joke, but one of my comrades told me this probably wouldn't be the best environment to walk around saying "remove your clothes!" And so there was some mingling, some tasty free food, and some casual flirting with girls from overseas. It all went well until they handed out some hommade "fortune" cookies, which concealed paper strips with bible verses on them, and we were told to match our "questions" with other people's "answers". I knew the party was a veritable Hindenburg when a girl from Japan pointed to the word "God" on her strip of paper and asked me "what is this word?"

Make a long story short, my friends and I left early. I don't know what became of all those confused foreigners we left in the hands of the masked Christians. I suppose the moral of this story is that one's religion will manifest itself in whatever that person does, from throwing a party to making a cookie, and that all parties that will lead to some kind of worship should be advertised as doing so, especially when non-English speakers are told by a friend of a friend to come to such a party on Friday night.

(By the way, I in no way dislike or discriminate against people of the Christian religion. I just think things they do are funny sometimes, and I greatly appreciate the food they cook or me at their parties. In fact, I wrote a song about it. Maybe I'll post the lyrics sometime. But I would like to say I do not listen to the band Bad Religion, and I do not endorse their angry music or striking fashion.)