Day 4 - Secular
He had a thin black tie, loosely covering the bright red buttons on his white dress shirt.
He ate as he talked to me. I could also smell the open bar on the hot air between us -- the exhaust of old ideas.
"That's unfalsifiable."
The words hung like hot fumes obscuring my vision of his face. I could see he liked the sound of grandiloquence, tasting each syllable like an unmet wine.
He looked up at me, "How do they believe things second hand like that? There's nothing good that religion has done that cannot be achieved without it."
We were only in a hotel lobby, waiting for an uber to bring us out to some place we could waste time at before sleeping.
He was motioning, in his mind discretely, to the Catholic kiosk near the door. The sign read, "It's not too late to be Saved."
"The 'S' bothers me, too. 'Saved.' Is it more divine to capitalize it?" He went on, "It's a form of violence, isn't it? Intellectual dishonesty. Telling children they inherited mistakes -- that they were sinners from birth -- it must cripple their self esteem."
My mind was still. I used to say things like that. I was desperate for validation for realizations I had just come upon. But as he held himself between self-congratulation and contempt, there was nothing to say.
I was grateful for my quiet against his striving for conversational space. I was content with listening, unbothered, neither giving nor taking. He wasn't.
"Atheism. Away from theism. I hate that I have to define myself against something."
He let his smugness linger for a while, as he found his next word, "Secularism. Honestly, I forget the exact meaning. I'm tired of needing to put all these identities into tidy little boxes."
Then, it seemed he remembered I was there, "What are you, anyway?"
"I am nothing," I said.
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