Sometimes, no matter how well you think you’ve learned your lessons, the world still finds ways to confound your wisdom and circumvent your insights.

Take my friend Brett, for example.

A fellow atheist, he has it as a simple, basic, fundamental rule in his life to never, ever date christian girls. They can’t be trusted. This is a known fact. Ask any atheist who’s ever made the mistake of dating a christian girl, and they will share their stories of how the girl in question flaked out on them, betrayed them, turned on them, or else just basically went wrong on them. And so, now, at the very beginning of every prospective relationship, he always asks them if they’re christians. If the answer is yes, he wisely ends it right then and there.

However, as noted, the world finds ways to confound your wisdom and circumvent your insights.

The other day, he and I were out to lunch at a local eatery, and he told me a tale of the dissolution of his latest relationship. This girl – whose name he did not offer and which I didn’t care enough to ask – had been going out with him for five months. At the beginning of this relationship, he asked her, as usual, if she was a christian. Her response, essentially, was "Well, my family sort of is, but it’s not a big deal, not a big part of our lives or anything. I don’t really care about it". Brett considered this to be "good enough". More the fool him, as it would turn out.

Five months later, he was quite, quite smitten with this girl, and thinking seriously about a future with her. It was during a discussion with her on this topic that certain revelations, if you’ll pardon the expression, came to light. As it turns out, she was a christian. And rather actively involved, actually. While it remained true that her family was "sort of" involved in christianity, it might have been more honest to say that her father was a minister at a Pentecostal church, and that she was herself a Sunday school teacher. As it turns out, moreover, she felt that her relationship with him had progressed to the point where she could now demand that he join her church as a prerequisite for continuing to date her.

Brett, dear man, is a fellow who loves deeply. And though he felt betrayed by her deception, nevertheless tried to salvage the situation. Could they continue on together and just not involve her religion? Could she go to church on Sunday and just leave him at home? If they were to have kids together, could he just not be involved in their religious upbringing? No on all counts. He was to convert immediately, permanently and passionately, or else it was over. She felt, it seemed, that they’d been together long enough that he was unlikely to say no to whatever demands she might make in order to sustain their relationship.

This was a game she’d played before, you see: As it would turn out (upon Brett’s later investigation), three previous boyfriends of hers were members of her father’s congregation; she’d forced conversion upon each of them, and then left them once that objective had been met. This was her real aim, it seemed: She was seducing people into conversion. Brett was the first one to have turned her down in this act of spiritual blackmail; the first person with the strength of character to stand firm by his principles in the face of her threat of denial-of-vaginal-access. The others, it would turn out, were all christians of other stripes; catholics and such. She didn’t know what she was getting into, trying to use her pathetic head games on a determined atheist. Brett called her a "Whore for Christ" to her face as he dismissed her from his life.

As we commiserated over this turn of events over a plate of nachos, I told him: "See, this is the problem with christians. They can lie to your face, stab you in the back, and betray you, and so long as they can then receive forgiveness from Jesus, they can be washed of all sin, and then it’s like they’ve done nothing wrong in the first place" I affected a high, feminine, baffled voice, as I asked "Why are you still upset at me? The sin is gone!". The problem, as I told him, is that their fantasy life will always trump their real life. Sure, she actually lied to you, and actually broke your heart, but in her fantasy life, she was trying to win souls for her imaginary god, and the imaginary good she was trying to do is more important than the actual harm she was doing. How can you ever reason with or expect rational behaviour from someone whose moral code is based upon non-real events and factors?

See, in her fallacious, nonsense cost/benefit analysis, it looks a little like this: "Alright, I lose a certain amount a of god points for lying, but I gain way more back by winning a new soul for christ, and then getting him to breed a litter of christlings (christlets? christopillars? I’m not sure what the accepted term is these days) using my (or some other christian girl’s) uterus, and so in the end, it works out in my favour". Brett then observed that he couldn’t believe that some christians actually use the word "god points" this way. I laughed out loud, at once both horrified and deeply amused; I’d thought "God points" was an incredibly cynical parody of the christian world-view which my friend Ryan and I had come up with some years back, but, no: Apparently some christians actually talk in these terms. These people get harder to parody every year.

In the end, he was able to laugh about it, but there was considerable ruefulness about it. Because he’d really thought he’d managed to put this kind of craziness behind him, but, as stated, life finds ways to confound your wisdom and circumvent your insights.