Religious People Are Narrow Minded

A True Story

A few years ago a co-worker overheard me talking to someone about building a computer. "Would you build me a computer?" she asked. She was a nice woman with a teenage son who'd never had a computer at home. I agreed to do it for the price of the parts plus $100 for time and labor. I ended up spending about a week shopping, a Saturday afternoon building the machine, and another day loading software.

My co-worker took the new computer home and asked her 15 year-old to set it up. He called me at work the next day with a question, "How do you turn it on?" As it turned out, he hadn't flipped a switch on the power strip I'd supplied him. Once this problem was done, I waited on the phone while his new machine booted up for the first time (for him anyway). He was excited as each message flashed on the monitor. It was working! Finally, the windows desktop appeared. Relieved that all was well, I prepared to return to the work I'd set aside momentarily. My mind had perhaps already shifted from the call, so his next question left me momentarily speechless. "What do I do now?" he asked. "Anything you want," I sputtered. It seemed the only possible answer.

That moment has stuck with me. I still remember the mixture of confusion, laughter and frustration I had at being asked "What do I do now?" I had created a machine, loaded it with an operating system, a word processor, a spreadsheet program, and some games. It was a starter computer, but even so there were an almost infinite number of possible answers to the question "What do I do now?" Write a poem, make a family budget, listen to a CD, check the sports page, scan a picture, play a game of solitaire - in other words, anything you can imagine. The thing that was humorous was that the young man seemed totally unaware of just how many choices he had. And without realizing it, he was asking me to choose for him.

It occurred to me that there were, in fact, a number of things a 15 year-old boy could do with a computer that I would not wish him to do. I hoped he would not use it to look at pornography, or download illegal copies of software, or spend money he didn't have on E-Bay, or simply waste time playing Minesweeper when he should be studying. In the hands of an adolescent, a computer can be a dangerous tool. On the other hand, I consoled myself with the thought that he could also use it to do research for term papers, or buy his mother flowers, or find a good local church. I had given him the computer, but the choice of what to do with it was not mine and neither, I realized, was the responsibility for those choices.

From the Christian point of view, this is precisely the position we are all in vis a vis our Creator. Each of us is given a body, a mind, and a will, which present us with a nearly limitless vista of choices. There are a great many harmful things we can do or say (to ourselves and others), but there are also an equal number of loving, kind and gracious possibilities. Ultimately no one else is responsible for the choices we make, not even God. We are free. But unlike me, God does not laugh or bumble when we turn to Him and ask "What do I do now?" For while it's true that He will not choose for us or limit our freedom, given an opportunity, He will tell us plainly what He wants. He will also encourage us to obey this advice and to trust Him when He says that He holds our best interest at heart.

According to Jesus, God's does in fact desire for each of us to severely limit the horizons of our behaviour, our speech and even our thoughts. There is no denying that this is so. It is not a peripheral matter, but the sum and total of the Christian faith. God's answer to the question "What do I do now?" is profoundly limiting but also limitlessly profound: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strenght and love your neighbor as yourself." This is the narrow-mindedness God desires.