Being smart doesn’t make you good.
I just met a remarkable woman on Bus #34 from Bangor Washington to the Kitsap Mall. She’s the driver and she gave me, in addition to timely and accurate directions to the Seattle ferry, a brilliant insight into the religious mind.
She’s a Christian, one of the fundamentalists people like Chris Hedges are so terrified of. She sees the Book of Revelation in every headline. “I don’t know,” she wonderes, “How long sin can survive.”
Yet when I mentioned I’d like to help build infrastructure in the third world, she immediately told me about her own charitable contributions, most of which are to orphanages in Egypt. She was supposed to visit Bangladesh recently and when the plans fell through sent money to an orphanage there.
This remarkable woman is a bus driver, so she’s not in the highest of income tax brackets, yet she still manages to support multiple worthy causes and help people who are suffering in lands thousands of miles from her own.
Her middle name is a feminized version of Isaac. So the subject her biblical namesake, the son of Abraham, immediately came up. She mentioned that of the two brothers, Isaac was the one chosen by God. I mentioned that in Arab tradition it’s the other way around.
“Well, they’re wrong.”
She said it with flat certainty, the same way I’d observe that someone who thinks that Ben Franklin was President is wrong. She then said that she prays for Muslims, but that they’re often led astray: “They really believe it. It’s political. It’s spooky.”
I just met a remarkable woman on Bus #34 from Bangor Washington to the Kitsap Mall. She’s the driver and she gave me, in addition to timely and accurate directions to the Seattle ferry, a brilliant insight into the religious mind.
She’s a Christian, one of the fundamentalists people like Chris Hedges are so terrified of. She sees the Book of Revelation in every headline. “I don’t know,” she wonderes, “How long sin can survive.”
Yet when I mentioned I’d like to help build infrastructure in the third world, she immediately told me about her own charitable contributions, most of which are to orphanages in Egypt. She was supposed to visit Bangladesh recently and when the plans fell through sent money to an orphanage there.
This remarkable woman is a bus driver, so she’s not in the highest of income tax brackets, yet she still manages to support multiple worthy causes and help people who are suffering in lands thousands of miles from her own.
Her middle name is a feminized version of Isaac. So the subject her biblical namesake, the son of Abraham, immediately came up. She mentioned that of the two brothers, Isaac was the one chosen by God. I mentioned that in Arab tradition it’s the other way around.
“Well, they’re wrong.”
She said it with flat certainty, the same way I’d observe that someone who thinks that Ben Franklin was President is wrong. She then said that she prays for Muslims, but that they’re often led astray: “They really believe it. It’s political. It’s spooky.”