Fire, brimstone and a couple chords

For those of you milling about Ballantine Hall and Woodburn Hall, you might have noticed a man with a guitar strapped over his shoulder preaching the Word of God.
While students jeered and laughed, this man strummed and hummed.

Well, it was more like shouting over some guitar chords that we were all sinners and were going to burn in Hell.

I had my first encounter with this man at 11 a.m. when he was stationed outside of Woodburn.

Few students had noticed him, but my friends and I, while walking to class, heard him shout, “God has told me that there are sinners on this campus!” followed by a G chord.

Laughing, we shrugged off his statements and headed toward Ernie Pyle Hall, and the thought of Preacher Man, as I so fondly christened him, left my mind.

That is, until later in the afternoon.

Heading toward the Theater Building, I noticed a significantly larger group of students crowded around the man.

Although I was going to be late to class, I decided to stop for a few minutes and take in what this man had to say.

What I garnered from his performance was that each and every one of us is a sinner. You’re homosexual. You’re liberal. You masturbate. You attend football games and frat parties. You curse. You breathe. And you’re pretty much guaranteed a spot in Hell.

The most natural response for the majority is to laugh at the absurdity of this extreme viewpoint.

I certainly got a few chuckles from this man’s demonstration, and, looking around at the other students, I was not alone.

Seeing this man preaching to us with his guitar and “songs” made me realize that, under other circumstances, students might have been more hostile toward him or even ignore him all together.

However, it was a performance to us, a spectacle to behold.

Most of the time, society doesn’t tend to be accepting toward those liberal college students who walk around campus discussing socially taboo topics or radical viewpoints.

But convert a controversial issue into a song or a play, and people will be much more receptive to the content.

Art, for generations, has been an outlet for citizens to communicate their opinions and ideas without being ostracized from society.

Therefore, it is our duty to uphold this tradition of allowing others to express their beliefs, even extreme ones, in order to have healthy communication of these otherwise intolerable topics.