A mural on Ohio Street near University Avenue

Well... as I expected he might, the friend with whom I had a conversation about religion a few days ago wanted to talk with me today about my having said in a BLOG post that there are expressions of belief and practice absurdly described as the teachings of Jesus.  I wanted to continue the conversation perhaps even more than he did.  He started by asking how in the world I came up with the notion that Christians have genocidal dreams.  He was incredulous that I would suggest that Christians would ever have entertained the notion that anyone should be murdered, much less kill a bunch of people who all belong to a particular group. I reminded him that I had said absurdly attributed to Jesus, the First Century radical Jewish rabbi credited with posthumously giving a new religious movement it’s name... Then I asked if he had ever heard of Ishi, a Northern California Native American (Yahi), who was the last of his tribe  to survive the systematic slaughter of his people only a little more than a century ago in the Feather River Canyon north east of Chico, California. (You can check the Internet for more details of Ishi’s story. Several good references... The Wikipedia account is the way I remember it from sixty years ago.)

My San Diego friend is twenty years younger than I am, so he may not have read or heard about Ishi, but he can’t have missed hearing about the holocaust the President of Iran and many other people alive today who deny the holocaust ever happened. He saw where I was going and countered with, “O.K., O.K., but those atrocities weren’t  planned by Christians.” I said I don’t know details about Christians being among those who planned and carried out the holocaust but that there is no doubt about complicity in the horror by thousands of Christians. I reminded him that we were talking about genocide.

He asked about Ishi, so I told him about hunting parties from Oroville and Chico who went out to find and kill indians... basically for sport because these were essentially peaceful people and posed no threat to the communities dotted with Protestant and Catholic churches in Northern California.  “But it’s not as if the churches had something to do with a scheme to get rid of Indians,” he said. 

... And I said, “I can’t claim to be an expert in the history of California, but as far as I know, there’s no record that any church groups made an effort to stop the killing of Indians for sport.” I told him that I first learned about what happened in the Feather River Canyon when I was an undergraduate student at Chico State University.  I was astonished to learn of it then, and I am appalled now to think of it.  My friend sat quietly looking at me, and before he had given it much thought he said, “What makes you think the holocaust was a Christian effort?”  Knowing that he had been to Europe and had at least as many times as I had been and had surely wandered through several cathedrals in Germany, I didn’t say anything.  Then he said, “Oh...  I see what you mean.”

My friend and I talked for about an hour, agreeing that slavery in our country wasn’t genocide but that it was egregious none the less. After our conversation wandered all over the place, we got to speculation about what the Supreme Court would decide about DOMA.  My friend doesn’t agree with me that DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, violates the constitutional rights of gay citizens. Our disagreement on that matter led to another disagreement which he considers an even more serious, so he said, “Surely you think America is a Christian nation.”

I won’t go into the details about the next half hour of discussion, but it gave me a chance to say what I’m sure he knew I would say, that ours is a nation of people of many religions and of no religion at all.  We will, of course, continue to be good friends, but he was clearly uncomfortable with my saying I wish we had no references to God in our government documents and rituals which are supposed to represent all citizens.  He handed me a quarter and asked if I’d prefer not to have In God We Trust stamped on it.  I told him I think the declaration on the quarter is at least inappropriate and perhaps even subversive to the intent of the Constitution.  It doesn’t represent all citizens.

By the way, I got his permission to write about our coffee chat.   Before we went our separate ways, he asked if I’m not afraid that taking God out of government will lead to even more lawlessness and a more degenerative culture.  We will undoubtedly continue the conversation.

A piece of contemporary mural after Diego Rivera 

in the annex of the San Diego Museum of Art.

Another mural at Ohio Street and University Avenue.  

North Park is becoming a community of murals.