According to IMDb, Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out on Dec. 7, 1979. I probably drew this comic strip over Christmas break when I had no homework. In hind site I had no grounds for depression. I was happily married, happily employed as a youth pastor, and happily selling cartoons to Leadership Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. What was so depressing? The relentless clash between my fundamentalist mind and secular university. Other recollections of gloominess....
During a lecture by Ralph Nader I was this close (thumb and finger almost touching) to asking him, "What's the point of consumer protection and truth in advertising? We're all going up in flames eventually anyway."
In a rhetoric class wherein I presented a pro life position more students became pro choice after my talk than before. This was a blow to one immersed in a subculture (evangelicalism) where powers of persuasion were a badge of honor. A persuasive speaker I was not.
I held the door open for a female student once and she scolded me for being sexist, "I can open the damn door myself!" A puzzling comment to one who thought being polite was a virtue.
Despite my best attempts at my Francis Schaeffer, Josh McDowell, CS Lewis, Benard Ramm, and Norman Geisler inspired apologetic, profs and hapless fellow students unfortunate enough to fall within earshot remained impervious to my proselytizing. Since I didn't believe the message was at fault it could only have been my delivery, thus cause for shame and guilt.
In a public lecture earlier that year I asked Madelyn Murray O'Hare what hope atheism had to offer a guy like Woody Allen who was afraid to die. She told me, "He has to face it; he's going to die like all of us." Then for effect she ripped pages out of a Gideon Bible laughing maniacally and mocking God, "If you're real, please strike me dead for blasphemy." I never expected matters of faith to be popular, but an object of ridicule? My, my, my.
I have an armload of other drawings from that era [of talking heads by the way] but they're, well, too depressing to post.
Had I been acquainted with Dr. Q in those days I suspect I'd have enjoyed the camaraderie of a fellow ponderer, flummoxed theologian, and the acknowledgement of existential conundra and mystery. In Ecclesiastes University I'd like to do for today's depressed university students (if there are any left) what I wish somebody had done for me; validated the truth that fundamentalism isn't a coherent, air tight, black/white world view yet there is room for faith, theism, and hope.
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