Cafe -- Friday May 10 8:30pm

You must be a Christian.

Tanya grew up in the village. Went to church all her life. Her family was active in Pastor Bob's church and shee had been active in the youth group before going away to the city to college. Tanya was attractive and Derek was handsome and a real catch. She was very flattered when he started asking her out. This weekend she brought him home to meet her parents, not because their relationship was that serious but because he kept bugging her to show him the village that she talked about all the time. After supper, conversation with the parents grew thin and the kids escaped the house. After driving around awhile, they ended up at the cafe.

Tanya: My gosh, you are eating that banana upside down.

Derek: What do you mean upside down.

Tanya: You opened the wrong end of the banana. I never saw anybody do that before. That is so weird.

Derek: How do you know which end is the right end.

Tanya: Everybody knows how to eat a banana.

Derek: You must be a Christian.

Tanya: Why do you say that?

Derek: You think that the way you do things is the only right way and that everybody has to do things the way you do.

Tanya: Well at least I don't eat a banana upside down.

Derek: Yeah, Christians are always confusing culture, tradition, and convention with morality.

Tanya: What is that supposed to mean.

Derek: It means that a lot of times, Christians think that if somebody does things different from the way they do things that the other person is wrong, stupid, or immoral. Some Christians think that the way things are done in their culture is morally correct and people from other cultures who have different beliefs and different traditions are just wrong.

Tanya: Well you have to admit, things are a lot worse now than they used to be. Now-a-days anything goes. If it feels good do it. Nobody cares whether it is moral or not. You didn’t have that kind of thing in granddaddy's day.

Derek: Yeah, that's the other thing about Christians. They are always living in the past.

Tanya: And what is that supposed to mean.

Derek: That Christians are always saying that things are worse now than they used to be.

Tanya: Aren’t they?

Derek: Oh, yeah. The good old days; when Christians used the Bible to defend slavery and to oppose giving women the right to vote and when it was ok to pay a woman half the salary you'd pay a man for the same job. Yeah, the good old days when a man could come home and beat his wife and children and the police wouldn’t interfere because a man had the right to run his household however he wanted to; when the races were kept separate and it was ok to discriminate against people who were different than you. The good old days when a businessman could poison the lakes and streams with the waste from his factory and nobody cared. Sure, we'd really like to go back to them good old days.

Tanya: That's not what I meant.

Derek: Like different cultures marriage traditions. In some cultures, the girl has to get pregnant before she can be married. No man in that culture wants to marry a woman that can't get pregnant.

Tanya: Well, that is wrong.

Derek: Well that is what I said; a lot of Christians are moralistic, judgmental, egocentric, provincial, and ethnocentric.

Tanya: Well I don't care, it is wrong to have sex outside of marriage.

Derek: In that culture, the sex is not outside of marriage. The couple is betrothed before they begin having sex. It is just that the marriage contract cannot be completed until the woman gets pregnant. The sex and the getting pregnant are considered part of establishing the marriage contract.

Tanya: Well I never heard of such a thing.

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Steve Falkenberg

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