"Would you like some water?" I asked.
The man sitting across from me looked thirsty and tired. It was only eight-thirty in the morning and the temperature was already in the high nineties with a drenching humidity index.
He was our translator, and we were in a convoy heading from Balad Air Base to Al Asad in Baghdad. We had been in the MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) personnel carrier for nearly an hour and he hadn't taken a drink. I thought he had forgotten his water and was too shy to ask. But he politely declined and said, "No thank you. It is Ramadan. I cannot consume anything while the sun is up."
Because I'm the curious type, and I was a good Christian at the time, we struck up a conversation. I wanted to know more about his faith, what Ramadan was all about, and take advantage of any opportunity I could to share the good news of Jesus with this poor lost soul who wasn't even allowed to drink water on a hot day.
That trip lasted at least six hours one way, and another six on the way back. In the MRAP we were each strapped to the wall to keep us safe in case we got attacked. That meant we each had a captive audience and talked endlessly about our respective favorite subject - our religion.
Until that point, one of the greatest questions of my life had been whether the King James or the New International Version was a better translation of the Bible. I grew up in the church with most of the men in my family being pastors, elders, and Bible teachers of various sorts. I'd attended Liberty University to work on my theology degree, and I had an impressive resume of Bible courses I'd taught myself. Above all that, I'd spent two years working in a door-to-door ministry at a big Baptist church in Southern California.
I can remember teaching a class on Christian philosophy where the premise was that the philosophical law of noncontradiction proved beyond any doubt at all that Christianity was the correct faith for humanity. The law states that two contradictory ideas cannot be true in the same sense at the same time. And, since the historicity and theological soundness of Christianity were indisputable... everyone needed to be a Christian.
I KNEW my religion.
And so did the translator.
After twelve hours of going back and forth, tit for tat, point for point...neither one of us were able to poke any holes in the opposing argument which was, essentially, "My faith is better than yours, and here is why:"
Nothing. Zero progress made.
This wasn't the first time I'd had a debate like that. In all those years of being in the church, I'd had my share of challenges, but this one was different. Leading up to this talk, I'd been having flickering doubts.
A few months before, I'd come across a book titled A Course in Miracles. If you're not familiar, it is a work that was channeled by a team of mental health workers and claimed to be the words of an incorporeal Jesus Christ himself. I don't recall how the book came across my path, but it had become part of my life. Had I been a younger Christian, I probably would have scoffed at such a book and avoided it like any sensible person avoids dancing with a cobra. But I was confident in my faith and boldly dove into the book.
Part of the book is set up as a series of lessons about ideas that the student should meditate on. Each idea is meant to be meditated upon for a day or more before moving on to the next one. When I met the translator, I hadn't made it past the first four lessons before things began unraveling.
The first lesson is this: "Nothing I see in this room means anything." This isn't a nihilist approach to reality or a defeatist attitude, but simply an observation. It's the first step in reconstructing one perception of reality. Think of this statement as taking you back to when you were an infant and knew nothing about the world. At that point in your life, you would have no idea the difference between a dog, a cat, or a pen. It isn't until we develop in our lives and become familiar with the world around us that we begin to assign meaning and values to the objects we see.
The second lesson is just that: "I have given everything I see in this room all the meaning that it has for me." Because I was sort of a philosophy buff, these ideas didn't impact me much. It was a simple task for me to look at a lamp or computer or window and agree that the meaning it had for me was different than the meaning it had for someone else, and therefore the meaning of any object is assigned by the individual perceiving it.
The third lesson was a little more challenging: "I do not understand anything I see in this room". This idea is where things can start getting out of control. I mean, if you're able to step back and look at any object objectively, all objects tend to lose their meaning. It's like when you play the game of saying a word over and over until it becomes a meaningless sound. This was a little more challenging, but I could wrap my head around it.
It was the fourth lesson that floored me.
"These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see in this room."
Once this process of deconstruction moved inside my head, I was in trouble. It was one thing to look at a pocketknife and have it morph from a desirable object to a meaningless lump of matter, but something else entirely to look let my thoughts do the same things. After all, a lot of my thoughts were about Jesus, God, faith, and all the things that fit in that category.
In other words, I'd been faced with the very real possibility that my thoughts about the divinity of the Christ were no more valid or worthwhile than my thoughts on the usefulness of a spoon.
After getting to that lesson, I'd been drawn to the song Whoops, by Blues Traveler. In it, there's a line that says, "Have you ever seen an atom? Little bits of everything floating by. Take a good look at them. Collectively they compose all you see including your eye."
When I got out of that convoy MRAP at the end of my twelve-hour debate with a Ramadan practicing Muslim, I was a different man. I'd lost the meaning of my faith and the meaning of the objects around me. I was also faced with the reality that we humans are not what we tend to think we are - especially the Christian version. We aren't solid life forms put here to do the work of a distant deity. Instead, we are an intricately bound conglomerate of atomic components somehow collectively experiencing the reality we perceive ourselves moving through in our boring day-to-day.
If it hadn't been for that, the next thought probably never would have occurred to me. It was this: if two reasonably well-versed members of traditionally opposed religions cannot come to anything but an impasse, then perhaps there is another solution. In other words, I'd met my match and run headlong into the law of noncontradiction.
I pushed this idea off for weeks knowing the truth I would have to face. I didn't want to admit it, I didn't want to think about it, I wanted to put the whole experience aside and get back to my comfortable world of worship teams and Bible studies.
But the hard truth was staring me in the face. If two opposing ideas cannot both be true, then there must be a third option: two opposing ideas CAN both be false. And if they are both false, then a third idea can rival them both and emerge as truth.
