The Everyday Club

8/9/10   Marco,    about 30
Like much of the rest of the city, the central plaza of Monterrey has numerous street vendors selling food and gifts.  One young man (Marco) had spread out a rug and was selling homemade jewelry, different from others we had seen because much of it was made from Indian artifacts such as arrowheads.  Marco is a psychiatry professor(?) at the university and could speak English fairly well so we had a longer conversation about his beliefs.  He describes himself as a "free thinker" which I know to be a term that atheists use to descibe themselves, and he had grown up with atheist parents.  If he did believe in a religion he said that Buddhism seems the most attractive to him.  When I talked about some of the basic beliefs of Christianity, such as sin or our accountability to God or Jesus' claims to be the Son of God, he dismissed each point with a lot of religious-sounding rhetoric, mainly based on the idea that "everyone interprets the Bible differently."  He seemed to be a classic example of post-moderism, which rejects absolute truth and claims that truth is relative, that "if that's what works for you I'm happy for you, and you should be happy about whatever works for me, but I will not tolerate your claims of absolute truth".   The discussion seemed to be getting nowhere, so we went on our way.