Taking a cab to Jesus

My cab driver last night was from Egypt and was a member of the Coptic Orthodox Church. How do I know this? Well, because I spent 20 minutes inside his cab being bombarded by a plea to accept Jesus as my saviour.

It started innocently enough, all he did was ask me if I was going to church on Christmas and I replied "No, I don't believe in God". Apparently the English to Arabic translation of this statement is "I want to believe in God, please spend the next 20 minutes telling me about the glory of Christ".

It was turning into a very loooong cab ride so I decided to start answering his questions with questions of my own: "Why are you Christian and not Muslim like most people in Egypt?". The apparent English to Arabic translation of this statement was "Tell me why you hate Muhammad", which is what he preceded to do for five more minutes. His story involved an 85 year old woman being ripped apart between two camels (honestly, I couldn't make this up if I tried) which he claimed to have witnessed, apparently she was a Christian lady and had therefore signed her own death warrant.

Now, I don't know if the story was true or not, I certainly hope not, but what he failed to understand about me was that I don't believe in Muhammad either and he could have been talking about a Nightmare on Elm Street movie for all I knew.

I started babbling the lyrics to the song "God" by John Lennon in the back seat:

I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in Mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in Yoga
I don't believe in kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles
I just believe in me
Yoko and me
And that's reality

The first lines in the song above are " God is a concept by which we measure our pain". 20 minutes in a Jersey City cab and my head was pounding. Jersey City cabs are disgusting and they are nearly always falling apart, they have defective steering and half of them don't have seat belts. Again, I wish I was making this up, but I have to say that if there is one place where I am not going to achieve a religious epiphany, it's in the back of a Jersey City Cab. The only conversion happening in this cab was the smell from the catalytic conversion. Happy Christmas y'all.