Friendly Atheist Contest #9: Roommates and Religion

Second the Atheist limerick contest.

My roommate story:

Freshman year of college I end up rooming with a guy named Ed. At this point I’m an agnostic making those last steps toward an out-and-out atheism. Ed, on the other hand, is… credulous. Gullible if you’re being less polite. He believes in crystals, and magic, and spirits, and energy, and Jesus, and Buddha, and UFOs, and damn near anything else.

To finish this story you need to know that our beds were bunked, with mine on the top, they weren’t all that sturdy, and he had an inexplicably hot girlfriend who occasionally spent the weekend. Also that my home state of Michigan is not earthquake country.

I’m slow to wake up to outside stimuli. I need to turn up my alarm clock to ‘earsplitting’ in order to wake to it.

I slowly come out of a sleep stupor on a Sunday morning to note a weird light in the room, unlike either sunlight or the overhead light. Not worth waking up for. Back to sleep.

I half wake up again, this time because of what I assumed was a small earthquake. The bed was shaking back and forth with increasing violence. As my sleep-addled brain is trying to work out how cause for alarm I should have, the smoke alarm goes off in our room.

I leap out of my top bunk and onto, next to, and around naked flesh. I note the light from something like eighty candles in our room as the three of us, in a simultaneous panic, run out into the hallway. I’m in pajamas. The two of them are covering their nakedness with a bedsheet and a book. The book? “A Guide to Tantric Sex”.

Hmmm, well I got a few from living with a liberal Catholic back during my first year. Most of were not particularly amusing, most of them were him and his girlfriend getting upset at me chuckling at them discussing the merits of the bread as a reflection of “the actual body of Christ.” Ok, I admit, I was a bit more militant back then and Sam Harris came to mind when they were discussing it. And then there was that time when he admitted that I and four other billion people on this planet, including two that he’s rooming with this year, are going to hell.

Anyway, my story. Don’t remember how it came about but it was the time where his girlfriend, who lived in a different residence, was telling me how he lost her keys and couldn’t find them. Alright… She said she searched everywhere in her apartments until in the end she opened the freezer door and her keys fell out. Yep… She also said that it was “impossible” for the keys to be there since that would have meant that no one else in her apartments would have opened the freezer since she got back early the previous day (which apparently was also impossible). She and my roommate had to go then but she concluded that it was because of that that she thought that God exists since “there has to be a reason.”

I was a bit speechless at that statement, that’s probably the worst proof for God since the banana, but then I reflected on it. So God, the omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent creator of everything in the universe reveals his eternal and immutable plan to bipedal, carbon-based, ape-descended organisms on a small blue and green planet in the boonies of space by… hiding keys in freezers. God, obviously, has too much time on his hands.

My religious roommate was my boyfriend. I was sort of New Agey and he was a rabid atheist. He (and his kids) used to annoy me with his constant sniping and laughing at religion. As a result, we didn’t talk much about religion for 7 years or so. Secretly I thought he would spoil things for me. Then I went to study my own religion in depth and came home with -surprise! – questions the minister couldn’t answer. We started discussing stuff and I began researching online and readings lots of books about the origins of Christianity and so on. Upshot is that 3 months later I was an atheist as well. Now, having deconverted, I’m more of a militant atheist than he ever was.

I vote for limericks, too!

This isn’t really about my roommate, but its still kind of a funny story. Immediately after graduating High School, I took six months off before starting college, during which time I spent living with a friend of mine in an apartment we shared. I was outspoken about my atheism at that point, and he was a somewhat liberal christian, but enjoyed making fun of fundies just as much as I did. One Saturday morning, about 7 a.m., a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses came to our door, waking us both from a deep sleep induced from a late night of drinking. I opened the door, they introduced themselves and asked if they could come in and talk for a few minutes. Having nothing better to do, I invited them into the living room, and they sat across from us, bibles in hand. After a few minutes of them explaining the church and ‘god’s plan’ for us, I motioned to my friend, who pulled out a full standing water bong we had purchased together a couple of weeks ago. He lit up s full bowl, and we started passing it between us. The two Jehovah’s Witnesses, obviously startled, stumbled at first, but quickly regained their composure as they continue talking about what “god demands of all of us”. After probably five or ten minutes of us blowing smoke in their faces, one of them stopped the speech, and said, “If you’re serious about joining the church, you’ll have to give that up,” motioning to the bong. We both laughed and I told them that I was an atheist, and my friend was firmly set in his own beliefs. Soon after, they left with nothing more than disappointment and a contact high.

Well, this didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to a good friend of mine, and I thought it worth sharing. My friend was going to Virginia Military Initiate in Lexington, VA (the heart of fundie country unfortunately, and he being from this liberal area, it was culture shock). He had 3 roommates. One was non-religious, one was a very hard core fundie, and one was not really fundie but religious and very gullible. My friend at the time was a lapsed catholic who hardly ever went to church and was beginning to lean towards deism/agnosticism. So anyway, the fundie roommate would lecture them all about the bible being the literal truth and he would get really annoying.

Now, what would happen at night very often was the people on night watch would quickly check the rooms with a flashlight to make sure everyone was in bed (basically to keep people from sneaking out). This usually consisted of the door opening slightly, a flashlight quickly coming in and around the room, and then the door closing. My friend noticed it half asleep many times and it never bothered him. Apparently though, the fundie roommate must have slept through it b/c the first time he noticed it he freaked out-one night it happened, as usual, my friend noticed it half asleep, the door opening a crack, a beam of light circling the room, and then the door closing. No big deal, he went back to sleep, but not for long.

He suddenly heard screaming and then chanting-apparently the fundie roommate had decided that the light (which he apparently had just noticed for the first time) was satan trying to enter the room, and he had to exorcise the room. He got the gullible guy to go along with him-so my friend fully wakes up to the two of them running around the room chanting, blessing water to make it holy, and then sprinkling this water all over the room. At one point they got down on their knees and prayed before their beds for the room to be cleansed of evil. At this point the 4th roommate is awake too. He and my friend just looked at each other, shook their heads, started to laugh, and tried to go back to sleep.

The exorcism lasted about an hour before anyone could finally sleep. My friend and his other roommate had a huge laugh over it the next day, as did some of their fellow students, and many of us back home. I don’t know if the fundie and the other guy ever did figure out what it really was. I think my friend tried to tell them once, but they didn’t want to listen. We still laugh over that story.