Generally, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Generally, therefore, I would look approvingly upon a guy like Tim Tebow, i.e., a guy who annoys a lot of the right people.
But Tebow is also annoying me.
Why? Two reasons.
First, he's like my dad's golf buddies who won't shut up about golf--playing it, watching it on TV, planning golf trips, making their own clubs, meeting Jack Nicklaus, smoking a joint rolled from a Tiger Woods divot, etc.
Don't get me wrong; I think it's cool when people have passions in life, and when they share those passions with others. But if YOUR passions happen not to be MY passions, you need to extend me a little social courtesy and not talk about your passions ALL the effing time. And even if your passions ARE my passions, I still don't want to hear about them all the time--any more than I want to listen to my favorite song 50 times in a row, or wear my favorite jeans every day for a month, or eat DQ Blizzards at every meal.
It's all about moderation. Tebow isn't moderate in his proselytizing. I find that annoying.
Second, there's something off-putting about the way Tebow is just so sold out to Jesus. The closest comparison I can make is to Bill Maher--who is utterly smug, who is utterly contemptuous of those who disagree with him, and who is utterly wrong most of the tme (often out of ignorance, rather than logical error). I mean, it's one thing to be smug and contemptuous if you're the smartest person in the room, and if you're rarely ever wrong. It's fine, too, to be wrong most of the time if you show the requisite humility about it. But to be smug, contemptuous, AND ignorant...well, that's annoying.
Tebow doesn't give off an air of smugness, but he does give off an air of certainty...as if the truth of what he believes if self-evident, and beyond question or dispute. My view--documented on this blog in sickening detail over the years--is that the case for Christianity is flimsy. If you are a Christian believer, therefore, I think you are called to humility in the claims you make on behalf of your faith. Tebow doesn't exhibit that humility.*
I hope the foregoing doesn't come off as bigotry. I'm not anti-Christian, anti-faith, etc. That, in fact, is why I wrote this post. I think it's important to understand that not everyone who's sick of Tebow's public professions of faith is an anti-religious bigot, or a cynic rolling his eyes at Tebow's altar boy image. I'm just a normal guy experiencing what I consider to be a normal reaction to excess.
*Christians often skip over the historical record and talk about what God has put in their hearts. To them, what's in their hearts trumps the fact that, for example, the authorship of the Gospels is unknown. My question to such people is this: "How do you know God put that in your heart, rather than, say, your parents putting it there, or your pastor, or someone you admire in the community, or just your own brain? It's not hard to find examples of people convincing themselves of things that are demonstrably untrue, particularly when there are social, psychological, or material rewards for doing so."
The answer is usually along these lines: "It's just a feeling I have." If that's Tebow's answer, it's a pretty shaky foundation on which to erect such an ostentatious monument to Jesus.
Are you saying that Christianity is based on the Immaculate Inception?
Posted by: Lehigh | December 20, 2011 at 05:19 PM