Dear Hannah,
I've got something to confess.
The other day I was invited, by a man who personally ruined my old Bible study group, to have a discussion about the Holy Spirit. I'll admit up front that I lied to get out of it. I shouldn't have lied, but I lied boldly. I couldn't think of anything else to say. What do you tell a man when he gives you the option to meet at any time and you can't tell him he sucks? You don't want to be cruel -- you don't want to tell him that he drives you nuts. The most agreeable option at that point was to to say that I hadn't been interested in religious discussions for some time now, which is a lie -- because I'm very interested in having religious discussions. I'll have religious people over for dinner and talk religion with them for hours. I think he was one of the three people I know who I wouldn't have the discussion with even when I was religious, which meant my apostasy for once was actually useful. But he tried, God bless him; and when I shot him down he used a tactic that's always disturbed me, which was to tell me that he didn't want to have a religious conversation either. He said Jesus didn't want us to have religious conversations. I immediately knew what's coming next. They say because Christianity isn't a religion, and then they always find a way to add because Christianity is a relationship.