I was trying to make the point that even though we see attitudes like theirs represented in mass American culture (granted, they’re caricatures), much of those archetypal qualities were constructed out of whole cloth in the 1950′s and 1960′s, first in response to the Cold War and the Soviets (Walter), and second in response to those Walter-like figures (the Dude). He wanted more examples, so I brought up the “under god” in the pledge and on our money as a response to the godless Soviets. Many today take those things for granted, as if they were always there since the founding of the nation. My student did, and he was surprised to learn they were relatively new.

He wanted more examples of that sort of erasure of history, so I paralleled the above example with how much of Christmas celebrations comes from pagan ritual, and the church used to not tolerate such elements during Christmas. Yet every Christmas we see all of these pagan adornments and practices brought right inside Christian churches, and people sort of go about their business as if Christmas was always that way. The same kind of situation holds for the hyper-nationalism Walter is a caricature of in the film.

I never should have used the Christmas example because I didn’t know the student was raised in a fundamentalist home, so he started asking me what I believe. I hedged, as I don’t think it’s my place to throw out my own beliefs on religion in a public university classroom, especially in a class that has nothing to do with religion. So he pulled Pascal’s Wager on me.

Trying to figure out how to respond without coming right out and telling him what I believe and don’t believe, I said if we take the student’s position and assume god both exists and created us, then we also know he gave us rational minds to work through problems and assumptions, plenty of bible verses that talk positively about using reason, but I’m not sure of the right one to pull out for this argument — need to find that.) We know that rational minds have produced a lot of good for the world (computers, agriculture, Stanley Kubrick films), so if it’s good, this must line up with a god-given faculty.

That means that if we DIDN’T use that god-given rationality to question the veracity of god, AND if god exists, then we’d be acting against god’s will. If god exists and you didn’t challenge that fact through one’s capacity for rationalism, imagine getting to heaven’s gates and being sent away because it was a sin to act only on faith and not on the tools provided by providence.

Then I threw in the bit about the word Israel meaning ‘to struggle with god,’ and how in Judaism the nature of god is argued all the time, kind of like in the Talmud. (I’ve been to Seders where the after-meal debate turned into a referendum on whether Moses just led the Hebrews out of a physical slavery and into a moral one, and if Moses was doing this on orders from god, that makes god something like a spiritually ambivalent and plantation owner.)

He dropped it there, and said he didn’t know how to argue that. Granted, he’s a first-year college student. I don’t know how that would work against more sophisticated apologists. That’s why I need to find the verses praising rationality, and throw the special pleading flag when they say the bible wants us to reasons for god’s existence, not against.