Judgment Date
I met her on the Internet part 2
She was an ardent Christian. She was also a moron.
Now don’t get me wrong. Although the two are highly correlated, being an ardent Christian does not automatically make one a moron. Indeed, some of the most physically attractive people I know are ardent Christians.
However, being an ardent Christian does not automatically make one physically attractive—especially in her case. Indeed, I’ve met mildewed waterbed mattresses more deserving of my physical love than this particular specimen. She was, unqualifiedly, ugly.
And, as I previously hinted, she was a moron. You can spot a moron quickly over e-mail, because the medium is so writing-intensive. Could she compose a proper sentence? Not really. Could she spell? Not really. Could she grasp the concept of the paragraph? Not at all. Her e-mails read like they were cribbed from the opening pages of Flowers for Algernon. She was, unqualifiedly, stupid.
In summary, every scrap of evidence I could glean from our online interaction pointed to the inescapable conclusion that C (her real first initial) was profoundly unattractive on every level. Her barely concealed contempt for me and my atheism was the icing on the cake.
But what the hell. I met her for dinner. Why, you ask? It was an experiment in reverse (or is that backward?) psychology. I met her because she was quite possibly the least compatible woman in my age group I had ever met. I just wanted to see what would happen.
As for C, she wasn’t romantically interested in me, either. I think she came to dinner because—believe it or not—I don’t think she’d ever known an atheist before. By all indications, she just wanted to see a real, hard-hearted, spiritually bankrupt person in the flesh, and also wanted to score a new convert for the big guy in the sky.
It was a date of many revelations. For example, I thought she was a high-school dropout. In fact, she holds a degree from an American Bible college—an institution that had left her shockingly ignorant about almost everything, especially the Bible. It turned out she hadn’t even read the whole thing, which wasn’t a surprise.
We argued about Christianity for the whole date. She thumped the Bible. I bashed it. And finally, she proved herself to be even stupider than I believed possible.
Forget her uninformed, foaming-at-the-mouth religious belief. Forget the semi-literacy, and general out-to-lunchedness of the woman. C revealed her true, hulking moronitude when she told me that her favourite movie of all time—on every level—was Twister.
Yes, Twister, Jan de Bont’s low-brow blockbuster about intrepid tornado field researchers. Of all the movies I saw in the 1990s, Twister made me the angriest. Bad characters, lame dialogue, paper-thin plot, terrible continuity, and sophisticated yet crappy special effects aside, to this day I am stunned speechless by the fact a movie about tornado field researchers needed to have villains.
Yes, villains! In Twister, there are nice, cuddly, benevolent tornado field researchers, and there are evil, backstabbing, malevolent tornado field researchers. Who drive black, corporate-sponsored vans, no less. The stark, naked idiocy of this notion keeps me up at night.
As far as I’m concerned, any grown adult who venerates this film should be committed to a licensed psychiatric care facility without her consent. And as for the people who made it, they should be publicly stoned to death for this abomination against cinema. Verily, I wouldn’t even let them produce a film adaptation of the Bible.
But I digress.
Not long after our dinner, during which there were no conversions to or from Christianity, me and C’s little non-romance came to an abrupt end. I sent her a perfectly innocuous e-mail in which I discussed God’s baby-killing in the Old Testament, and gave her a preview of the scathing undercover exposé of the Campus Crusade for Christ I was working on at the time. This was her reply:
Hello Glen,
As of today I am ignoring you. Think you won, I dunno, I dont care, I am no longer stooping to your pathetic evil ways. You’re prob laffing right now. I am praying for you, I will warn you now. I will also warn you that the more you go on your ‘lets see how much we can bash Chrisitanity’ journey, that most people who try to disprove God, well they end up becoming Christians themselves. Well the the tru intellects to. I would not throw you in that category. Write what you will on Campus Crusade for Christ, they have done more good than you could damage, and they have the power of believers and God behind them, you only have your pathetic self and the devil, which you dont beleive in anyhow, and so just you. Have fun! This is my last email. Sorry you made it end like this. C.
And that was it. Somehow, I found the strength to put my life back together and move on.
However, I am reminded that I never did finish that exposé on the Campus Crusade. Surely, it is coming quickly. Amen.
Next week: Tawdry sex with a blonde, 39-year-old, nymphomaniac mother of two in part 3 of I met her on the Internet. Be there! •
Originally published in The Peak, February 26 2001. Sadly, I never did finish that piece on the Campus Crusade.
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