Facebook is like a tawdry skank you meet at a bar on a cold night in Laredo.  She lures you in and captivates you, and she shows you a good time on the wrong side of the tracks, but you’ll wake up in the morning heartbroken and deserted, your wallet missing and the taste of bad tequila on your breath.

When I first met Facebook, I knew there was trouble.  All of my young actors were raving about her.  And I learned quickly that she’s great for photo sharing and for reconnecting with old friends.  But Facebook studies you, sizes you up, and forms “algorithms” about you.  Thus she treats you the way she thinks you deserve to be treated.

In my case, from the beginning Facebook kept suggesting friends to me.  Apparently, Facebook looks at the friends you already have, analyzes your interests and assesses your profile, and makes a snap judgment about you.  In my case, Facebook had decided that I was a substance abuser who slept all day.  Thus all of the friends she was suggesting for me were losers and drug addicts.  She must have been doing this because 1) all of my early friends were actors and 2) I listed “Judge Judy” as one of my favorite TV shows.

Then Facebook promised me a really fun time.  She lured me into online Scrabble games with friends and utter strangers.  I quickly became addicted, playing into the wee hours and sleeping late the next morning (say – maybe Facebook was right about me all along!)  But then I began to realize that some of my so-called “friends” were cheating at Scrabble by using online word generators – websites that use computer technology to tell you what word to play and where to play it to maximize your score.  This became evident when one of my Scrabble rivals scored a ton on the word PSOCID.  Psocid?  “The larval stage of the common head louse,” my “friend” IM’d me.  Not exactly a word you would come up with on your own.

So I was on again off again with Facebook.  I walked away from her a few times.  We’d have fights, big ones.  Things would be said that we’d both later regret.  It was stormy, tumultuous.  Until we settled in for what looked like a long-term relationship.

I discovered that one of the keys to being happy with this woman was frequent “friend purges”.  A “friend purge” is when you get so sick of the people you’ve “frended” on Facebook that you course through the list of them and delete the ones whose status updates you can’t stand anymore.  It feels really good, and then you find that Facebook becomes fun again.  It’s like fighting and then making up after you fight.  Knocking each other down the stairs and then melting with tears of remorse into each others arms.

But lately it appears as if it’s over.  I’ve walked away from Facebook again, and I’ve been sleeping on the couch in my buddy’s house ever since.

The latest problem was this.  I was foolish enough to enter into intellectual discussions in comment boxes (“comboxes”) on certain topics (“threads”) of a theological nature.

I had foolishly befriended a Lutheran lady whose self-righteousness was matched only by her smugness.  She started a thread with a status update that said, “When I tell people that the Dalai Lama won’t go to heaven based on his good works, they don’t believe me,” to which one of her friends replied in the comment box, “Yep.  He’s got no more chance of getting to heaven than a dying coyote on the side of the road.”

Wow.

This I felt was just a tad bit lacking in Christian Charity.

So I got sucked in.  I entered into a series of combox back-and-forths, with my comments being countered by the comments of others.  And the more I tried to point out the Church teaching on salvation, on St. Paul’s generous attitude toward those who worship an unknown god, on the fact that all good comes from Christ and any attempt to serve god is a movement toward Christ (however imperfect that movement may be), how looking at any fellow man as a coyote dying in a ditch is akin to the self-righteous priest and Levite who passed up the victim who had been assaulted by the evil ones and whose rescue was procured only by a non-believing good Samaritan, at how, while faith in Christ is essential to salvation, we ought not to take glee in damning those who do not profess faith in Christ, etc.

And the fight was on.

I was countered by a barrage of attitudes and bizarre theology.  For example, one Calvinist supremely claimed that there is absolutely nothing we can do, there’s only stuff that God can do.  It’s all Him, never us, and really we’re puppets only.  No one wanted to look at the points I was making from Scripture – particularly the first three chapters of Romans.  Scripture?  It’s the only thing necessary for salvation, but we’re not going to treat it with enough respect to approach it with common sense or by reading it in context; no, we’re going to take the only thing we need for salvation (other than faith, which is the only thing we need for salvation), slap it around and then ignore it when it disagrees with us (kind of the way Facebook treats me).  The Dalai Lama potentially saved?  No way in hell!  We will set firm limits to God’s mercy and decide before hand who counts as a member of the in-group.  We can handle the final judgment, thank you very much.  Who needs St. Peter with the keys the heaven?  We’re minding the store, pal; no shoes, no shirt, no salvation.  Whatever counts as faith in Christ, we took care of that at the altar call ten years ago and we’ve been swinging that club around ever since.  So get out of our way or you’ll find yourself wounded and bleeding with those G-damned coyotes on the side of the road.

And then there was the character in another friend’s combox who was sublimely happy as an atheist, and who told me that he didn’t feel the need to seek the truth.  First of all, he said, there is no truth, and second of all, even if there is, it will come to him and all he has to do is wait for it.  “Is this the way you would find a job that you wanted?” I replied.  “If you meet the girl of your dreams, do you just sit there and wait for her to approach you?”

“Yes, I just sit and wait,” he responded.  “And as for meeting a girl … well, my partner and I are perfectly happy together,” he said – which I had kind of suspected.

And finally, after working with another atheist through a about a dozen replies in another thread, I had eventually gotten him to admit that recognizing teleology or a final cause in anything, even in sex, for instance, meant that one could not claim, as another atheist had in this same thread, that there are no final causes and hence no meaning anywhere in the universe.  And once he had conceded that point, I was told by the friend who had begun the thread that I was off-point and that, in so many words, converting atheists was not what the discussion was supposed to be about.

So finally I said, “This is casting pearls before swine” and I stormed out of Facebook’s house.

And as far as I’m concerned, we need never see one another again.

We may still make up, though.  I kind of miss her.

Kevin O’Brien
President & Artistic Director
Theater of the Word Incorporated
PO Box 29510
St. Louis, MO 63126
314-842-5300 / 1-888-840-WORD
www.thewordinc.org< /p>