As many of you know, I spent six days in the hospital last
month. Seems that I had a massive bacterial infection.
My heart rate sped up to 200 beats per minute and my
fever shot up to 103.4 degrees. I was pretty sick, but
things are somewhat better now. I’m still fighting the
infection and am on my third round of antibiotics. Then
there was the 10-hour nosebleed I had last week because I
was on too many blood thinners. Let’s just say it’s been an
interesting month; heck even the hospital proved to be an
interesting time.
I found out you meet a variety of people in the hospital.
Including a variety of religious folks. My roommate was
an older Catholic lady. Her relatives would come to visit
and often say the rosary with her. What I found
interesting is that while these people talked about loving
God and offering blessings to each other, they were some
of the most unethical people I have ever met.
Half of their time was spent talking about planning a
wedding for one of the grand-daughters and most of those
chats involved ways to lie to the people organizing the
wedding in efforts to get things cheaper. When the venue
the bride wanted only allowed 100 people and they were
planning on over 150 guests they all agreed to “just tell
them there will be only 75 people”, after all as they said
“what difference does it make?” And when the bride
found the dresses she wanted for the bridesmaids, she
bought them for around $150, but she and her mother
both agreed to tell the bridesmaids the dresses really cost
$200 — after all they needed the money.
This sort of thing went on daily — they even lied to the
nurses! I think half of their sentences began with the
words “just tell them....” They were perfect examples of
how “religious” does not mean “ethical”. I suppose I
don’t need to report that these people were HUGE George
Bush fans. It was rather scary how much they lit up when
Bush came on the TV.
Then there was the other extreme. One of the hospital
Chaplains paid me a visit. He had been out in the hallway
and saw I was friendly and visiting with folks, so he
decided to drop by. He was VERY pleasant. He told me
how he was frustrated lately with a lot of religious folks.
He said so many people are using religion as a weapon.
He said he and his wife had changed churches several
times in the past few years.
They were upset with how too many churches were all
about getting money out of you. He said that they left one
church simply because they “passed the collection plate”
three times during the service. I agreed with him that
three times was a bit excessive — the church I was raised
in sometimes passed it twice and I always felt that was
excessive. The church they were at now simply had a
collection box in the back of the church and there is no
pressure to donate.
He was also upset about how many churches are trying to
control every aspect of your life. His personal philosophy
was much like my own — people should be able to do
what they want as long as they don’t hurt others. He
noted that since Bush came into office, religion was not as
relaxing as it use to be — “people are much more uptight
at church” he said. Needless to say he was NOT a Bush
fan. We spent a few minutes Bush-bashing.
I told him I was an Atheist/Humanist and he said he often
thought about looking into Humanism more. I got the
sense that it would not take much to get him to turn
towards Humanism and I hope that perhaps I helped him
along that path. I mentioned Corvallis Secular Society to
him and told him there are other Humanists in the area
should he ever be interested. Who knows — this might be
the first time a patient in the hospital ever converted the
Pastor!
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Angela C. Byers
Copyright © 1996 - 2006 Angela C. Byers