The other day, an acquaintance that was considering playing floor hockey on our Recreational league team, wrote to tell us that she was having seconds thoughts. This person, a Christian, thought that our team name– The Jesus Cobras– was potentially insulting and offensive, and needed some time to figure out if she wanted to play beneath that banner.
This is the sort of thing that drives me bananas.
I certainly understand that a person might be uncomfortable– for whatever reason– with the name of the team. What bothers me is the implicit tut-tut moralizing in the note we received. If the person thought it was wrong to play for The Jesus Cobras, why not just say, “I’m sorry, as it turns out, I can’t play.” But no, this person chose to assume a higher moral ground, hoping, perhaps, to enlighten us so that we might change the name of the team to something more appealing to her sensibilities.
It made me think of the behaviour of an only child, and when Rachelle wrote back to say “well, let us know what you’ve decided,” we found out almost immediately that she decided not to play with us.
I suppose I’ve been taking this situation a little bit personally because I know everybody on the Jesus Cobras, and I know just how surprising, diverse and entirely excellent (if not particularly good at floor hockey) each one of them are, and for somebody to foreclose on their potential based on the name of the team seems, well, tragically small minded. If this woman had been able to apply Christian principles and reserved judgment on us until she’d had some experience with the team, or simply assumed the best, rather than worst, well, I’d have a lot more respect for her position.
Whatever the divine actually turns out to be, we can pretty safely assume that the religions that celebrate it are man-made constructs, subject to mortal flaws. Too often, the applications of these religions serve to inhibit rather than liberate, reducing the world to a clearly felt sense of what is right and what is wrong. As a result some people, with an obdurate and unblinking certainty, use their religious beliefs to propel them through the world, rather than into it, and that, in the end, is a very sad and lonely way to live.