really? cool, I better download it too.

I heard it when it aired here yesterday! She did great, and it's a fascinating segment.

Backstory, if you want it, is over here.

Yes, I listened to it in my car in a supermarket parking lot Saturday.

Very cool. I'm looking forward to listening to this later.

I just downloaded it. We were listening to TAL on a road trip but went out of range of all NPR stations before TrishaLynn came on. I am looking forward to hearing it today!

I will be downloading when I get home. Congrats TrishaLynn!

I'm so with Trisha on this, he and most everyone in his seat approaches the 'bringing back to God' argument wrong and uncharitably. Full disclosure: I believe in God, but not in any organized religion though I was brought up with two of the big ones. As for the coach: he does appear to live generously, and it's truly soul-lifting on the things he accomplishes and participates in... but I think that the truly righteous would have ended it there. Missionaries with agendas are incongruent with many of the dogmas they profess.

My father is a devoted Christian who had no problem marrying a Jewish woman and accepting evolution. It never even occurred to him that the Bible and '7 days' more fantastical elements were anything other than allegories for teaching purposes and that he used to wax poetic saying 'who knows how long a day is for God?' He used to flick through that 700 club television show and comment how those people only wanted power and used God to control folks. Anyone professing the active participation of ignorance, such as denying science and evolution are wrong and only out to control others. Anyone professing to know God's mind knows nothing at all.

Very few people actually read the doctrines they profess. Fewer still are those that are thoughtful about it. Only a handful in this world put it into practice.

Who said 'God wants companions, not disciples?' I think that's groovy. Why does it all exist and we have the capacity to understand it if we aren't at all intended to understand it? Who is to say science isn't the language by which God speaks to us?

Trisha's piece choked me up too when she was getting emotional, I know just where she was coming from there.

I choked up a lot during the sessions here and there, but every time I listen to it, it gets a little easier. Talking to Kelly's best friend on Sunday about how she felt about the show helped.

Will post more on the outcome of the story, how the sessions went (there were three in total; 2 with the coach and Jane Feltes recording, 1 with just me, Ira, and Jane the recording), and any and all reactions later this week on the blog.

I'm listening!

Wendell Berry tells a story about his brother in the hospital. A nurse tells his brother's wife that everything that's happening is normal and everyone goes through this. His wife responds, "He isn't everyone's husband, he's my husband."

That's how this feels. He's not treating Trisha like a person. She's just shorthand for "everyone who doesn't believe in God." Who loses their instinct to comfort and be kind when someone's obviously choking up and instead sees it as an opportunity to witness? The best witnessing would be to be your best self. And your best self should be someone with empathy who comforts and is kind to the grieving. It seems like Trisha is an abstraction to him, not a real grieving human who went to some length to reach out and be vulnerable.

You were great, Trisha.

Perfectly put birdie, I love your comment.

"anti-God people"...ish!

This is interesting; you can hear in his stone-blind fumbling the total failure of people who believe as he does to connect on an honest and meaningful level with people whose questions about faith, life, death, and meaning are complicated and big.

Recommending that you simply accept another's answers, turn off your mind and go in for the Manichean simplicity of a completely explained world - I don't blame you for not being "there yet." It's so seductive, and so comforting, to think you know all the explanations and all the rules. But rarely are such explanations truly adequate to all the needs in our spirits.

Thanks eatdonuts, and birdie, those were great comments, and express better what I think than I can.

Ultimately I have a hard time with absolutists like the coach. I had friends in college that took philosophy courses, and would go debate the existence of god with religious types. Not for any type of enlightenment, but just to demean them. What I see the coach doing here is just as demeaning. There's the usual faulty logic, and my favorite tactic which is when confronted with a question that you can't answer, just say that no one can answer it, it's impossible.

I have no problem with the Christian way of life and values. The general tenets seem pretty decent. I have a problem with the fundamentalist types who think everyone should be Christian. The bible literalism which completely misses the allegorical nature of the bible. The four gospels don't agree, and scholars say they were written for their specific audiences, and they understood the allegorical nature of them. 2000 years later these fundamental Christians have regressed, and are less sophisticated than the early Christians. Christians aren't the only ones guilty of that either. As Ghandi said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians."

Downloading it now.

I'm so tickled for you, girl.

Ultimately I have a hard time with absolutists like the coach.

One thing I noticed is that one reason this approach is ineffective is that you, as the listener, automatically start to glaze over. Once they (the proselytizers) retreat into the litanies, the prepared speeches, the cadences of the words they have heard and said and read and been taught over and over, the same-old same-old proselytizing conversation, they sound nothing more than generic. The words are pat and empty of meaning; the speaker might as well be reading from a script - nothing heartfelt, nothing truly responsive, nothing that acknowledges the actual deep problems and difficulties and contradictions and challenges of spirituality that theologians have been wrestling with for milennia without resolution, nothing, in fact, that would indicate listening or thoughtful response. It was simply a voice rolling down the list of talking points - even the attempts to infuse the voice with warmth seem forced, not natural.

I hope you don't stop asking big questions and challenging people to explain their beliefs, and I hope you don't assume this guy's simple little child's version of Christianity is the most interesting and meaningful it gets. This approach really doesn't work, and your interview started to show why.

Interestingly, the story right after is a great counterpoint, showing another version of the same rhetorical weakness and its results. The pro-legal-abortion mom does not engage in discussion or thoughtful response with her kid; she uses repeated, ritual language, black-and-white issues, and severe "agree with me or shut up" tactics to emphasize her points. Very soon you realize the daughter has crossed the line from uninformed about abortion (which she was at the time of her initial response) to realizing that she has found a great way to push her mom's buttons and differentiate from her all at once. Hints are that in the end she came out agreeing, but the tactics were not the best to use for the task, resulting in initial resistance/rebellion more than in authentic thought, earnest discussion, and struggle with competing moral concerns.

I really identified with your questions and your searching, TrishaLynn. I grew up as a solid christian. I went to church at least once (usually more) every sunday, read the bible daily and prayed, went to at least one bible study a week and christian camps once or twice a year. My faith kept me sane when my Dad died.

When I got older though, the flaws in logic started to become more and more apparent to me. I couldn't reconcile what actually exists in the world with what the people from church were telling me. I met gay people, and it challenged my accepted thoughts on homosexuality and I stopped seeing it as something sinful. I met people who had waited for sex, and who had had such a traumatic sex life that they ended up divorcing. I wondered if it wouldn't have been better for everyone if they had had sex before the wedding, learnt that they weren't compatible - and maybe not had as many issues relating to guilt and sex and so on - instead of divorcing.

The more I looked into things, the more the single minded, one-interpretation approach of many christians I knew put me off the religion. It seemed to me to have nothing to do with what the main precepts of the bible were. People seemed to be hung up over moral judgements - like sex before marriage or homosexuality - which were more cultural and definitely open to interpretation - than the main principles that Jesus espoused. Where was the loving others as themselves in the church? if people took that seriously - how can they justify their treatment of refugees? their demonisation of Muslims? the hardness and patronising attitude to the poor - even voting right wing - how can a people who purportedly want to serve others and their God be so callous and unforgiving in actual life? How can they judge other people - when we are repeatedly warned in the bible to not judge?

Over the last few years my faith has ebbed. I want to believe - actually - more I want to WANT to believe. I hold onto the God that I know, and try to distance myself from those whose narrow and selective views of God lead to be didactic.

I am what I am - and things like sex are a part of who I am. I'm not going to cut that out, to deny the existence of a major part of who I am to be acceptable to God - and I don't believe he wants that. Surely if God created us then he made all of us, and therefore I shouldn't have to change or stifle my sexuality in order to become acceptable to him.

I believe in treating people with respect, love and compassion. To me that was the most important thing about Jesus' teaching.

As for your friend, TrishaLynn, I'm so sorry for the hurt and pain you're going through and have already experienced. When Dad died, knowing that there was some kind of plan helped and comforted me. I don't know how I would react faced with similar circumstances with my faith as it stands now.

I really identified with your questions and your searching, TrishaLynn. I grew up as a solid christian. I went to church at least once (usually more) every sunday, read the bible daily and prayed, went to at least one bible study a week and christian camps once or twice a year. My faith kept me sane when my Dad died.

When I got older though, the flaws in logic started to become more and more apparent to me. I couldn't reconcile what actually exists in the world with what the people from church were telling me. I met gay people, and it challenged my accepted thoughts on homosexuality and I stopped seeing it as something sinful. I met people who had waited for sex, and who had had such a traumatic sex life that they ended up divorcing. I wondered if it wouldn't have been better for everyone if they had had sex before the wedding, learnt that they weren't compatible - and maybe not had as many issues relating to guilt and sex and so on - instead of divorcing.

The more I looked into things, the more the single minded, one-interpretation approach of many christians I knew put me off the religion. It seemed to me to have nothing to do with what the main precepts of the bible were. People seemed to be hung up over moral judgements - like sex before marriage or homosexuality - which were more cultural and definitely open to interpretation - than the main principles that Jesus espoused. Where was the loving others as themselves in the church? if people took that seriously - how can they justify their treatment of refugees? their demonisation of Muslims? the hardness and patronising attitude to the poor - even voting right wing - how can a people who purportedly want to serve others and their God be so callous and unforgiving in actual life? How can they judge other people - when we are repeatedly warned in the bible to not judge?

Over the last few years my faith has ebbed. I want to believe - actually - more I want to WANT to believe. I hold onto the God that I know, and try to distance myself from those whose narrow and selective views of God lead to be didactic.

I am what I am - and things like sex are a part of who I am. I'm not going to cut that out, to deny the existence of a major part of who I am to be acceptable to God - and I don't believe he wants that. Surely if God created us then he made all of us, and therefore I shouldn't have to change or stifle my sexuality in order to become acceptable to him.

I believe in treating people with respect, love and compassion. To me that was the most important thing about Jesus' teaching.

As for your friend, TrishaLynn, I'm so sorry for the hurt and pain you're going through and have already experienced. When Dad died, knowing that there was some kind of plan helped and comforted me. I don't know how I would react faced with similar circumstances with my faith as it stands now.

gah! double post - can a mod fix this for me? thanks!

Oh, Trisha, that was just awesome. Thank you for sharing.

trishalynn - if you're still following this thread, I wanted to let you know that your segment is being discussed on Friendly Atheist. There's a pretty decent crowd of commenters over there.

Definitely still reading, and I think that if I can find a balancing discussion board, that'll be the subject of the next blog post.

Downloaded and finally had a chance to start listening to it this morning on the drive to work... just got to the part where the coach has commanded you to write him back, young lady! Can't wait to listen to the rest of it tonight. Woo!

Just caught it this afternoon, way to go!