Western Transitions (a brief travelogue)

 What would it be like to travel with only my thoughts? What would it be like to wander without a fixed destination, with only the most minimal of itinerary? What would it be like for an ordered, organized person to design a spontaneous adventure for the first time?

After much trepidation, some guidance from friends, and a truck packed with outdoor gear and a camera, I set off on a thirty day road trip across the Pacific Northwest. I didn't exactly know where I would go, or when I would get there, but I gave myself permission to discover those answers along the way.

And those became my Western Transitions.

Dear Bethel Missionary Baptist Church of Creswell, Oregon:

If you're going to send your moral entrepreneurs to knock on my front door and proselytize to me about the Bible, you simply must bring your 'A' game next time! The two young men you sent over were cutting and running in less than 10 minutes. I thought my eternal salvation deserved a bit more of their attention, especially given that they thought it wise to spend a Saturday evening knocking on my door to begin with.

Yes, I gave them a warm up act of reading a few very brief Bible passages and accepted that these claims may even be internally consistent... but then I pointed out that they failed to establish even the basic pretext of authority that the Bible would have for the metaphysical claims they were making about the universe, the epistemology of conscious experience, and the ability for non-physical beings of immense power to sometimes author specific books - but not films or computer software.

They presented an interesting theory about how they were the "real Jews" - which certainly surprised my upstairs neighbors who are of Jewish ancestry and watched with a mix of horror and amusement at this exchange. The two young men with Bibles in hand also seemed quite certain that The Book of Mormon was a "fraud" even though it contains claims of the same deficient evidentiary qualities as their own religious literature.

And this notion that I should want to go to Heaven even though they claimed my pets and non-believer friends won't be waiting for me is a really tough sell. If you're going to fabricate eternal promises, at least make them reasonably appealing to convey.

In any case... upon your Bible hucksters' next visit, please plan to stay for at least an hour because we have many basic logical and factual premises to establish before we can take on authority the claims you are making to be true. And if they could become less visibly agitated and defeated when their statements are challenged, that would be great!

You know where I live and I know your arguments better than you do.

Sincerely,
Danny Ledonne
atheist with respect to the ≈10,000 gods which humans have believed in at one time or another