There are some mentally handicapped people who swing by my gym sometimes with their caretakers. Some of them work out, others just sit around. I am not sure how impaired this one particular girl is, but she sounds very child like and has some sort of behavior issues. Not sure what the problem is.
Anyway, she is sitting at a table with her regular caretaker, and a caretaker I hadn’t seen before, both caretakers are just slow and tired and obese. They would never ever think of moving in the gym. They just sit and wait, just absolutely huge and slow and dull eyed.
I usually don’t listen to their conversations but I overhear the handicapped girl say, in a shrill childlike voice “There is no G-d!” The really heavy new caretaker tells her maybe her parents told her that, and maybe she believes it, but there definitely is a G-d. They go back and forth for a while. There is. There isn’t. is so. Is not. The caretaker doesn’t seem much smarter than the ward, but she is definitely calmer and not shrill.
, so…I swing by a little later and they’re still talking about G-d. The heavy lady is going through the whole” he sent his only son down” thing, but the handicapped girl is not following the thread of that story. Son? Down? What? The way the fat lady was telling it, it sounded kind of absurd, and the handicapped girl was probably thinking, this doesn’t really make sense. What is this lady talking about?
Then the fat lady, kind of frustrated she’s not making any headway regarding the handicapped girl’s soul with the carrot of being saved, whips out the well-worn stick of hell, and starts laying out the details of the pit of fire, and how the handicapped girl is going to have to suffer forever in a firey hell if she doesn’t accept Jesus.
It takes a good deal of my self-restraint not to make an offhand comment to the handicapped girl, who seems to be backing down from her assertion that there is no G-d, the fear thing definitely is working. But I say nothing. Probably get arrested if I made a snarky comment.
…Very distracted though …really want to leap to the side of the handicapped girl and say, yeah, stand up for what you’re thinking, don’t let this lady diss you…. All I can think is, how paternalistic conversion tactics are, and what an embarrassing little exchange this is…it would’ve made an awesome youtube video. Just mesmerizingly sad and meanspirited and shitty….
When the converter’s “you can believe what you want to believe but it’s just plain wrong” doesn’t work”, the converter historically is left with no option but to turn to violence (or its counterpart here, the threat of imaginary future violence).
I wanted to tell the handicapped girl, don’t let this woman push you around. Look at her! She can barely walk! She SO FAT! Why would someone who can barely move necessarily know definitively the absolute structure of the universe… But I didn’t. no good could come of it. Tolerance for religion…I suppose I was tolerant…but clearly the religious impulses of the heavy woman demanded ridiculing and taunting and scaring a handicapped girl.
Her extreme obesity I suppose isn’t relevant to the story, except we were in a gym, for crying out loud. They should all be moving about, all of them, caretakers and wards, experiencing the beauty of their G-d given bodies, instead of making the body so heavy she literally had to limp her way out of the door, waddling, sweating just to lift herself and lurch forward. It seemed an affront to the creator to abuse the body in that way.
“You don’t have to believe in G-d,” the fat lady said derisively, “some people just don’t believe in anything.” I guess it’s just difficult to be tolerant of this type of tactic, which seems to be embedded in the historical religious tradition…aggressively try to persuade, then kill or threaten if they don’t buy it. really glad i didn’t say anything. it probably wouldve come out as “back the fuck off!”
something about attempted conversions always gives Jews the creeps…probably cellular flashbacks from the spanish inquisition.
