Jesus Shaves Response

In "Jesus Shaves," David Sedaris makes one important observation; an observation one must keep in mind when studying religion. This point is that in today's world, a person of a particular faith is going to find ideas from other faiths to be far fetched or nonsensical, but if someone can believe something based on faith alone, then anyone can believe in anything.
Sedaris outlines his point by, first, telling of the scenario in which the students try to explain Christianity to a Muslim girl. The students must speak to each other in french because that is they're only common language, which ends up confusing the situation due to the fact that none of the students are fluent in french. So, with broken french, the students try to accurately convey the story of Christianity to a girl who believes in tremendously different principles and after a while, the Muslim girl stops listening to the muddled description. Sedaris then makes the point that even without the language barrier it still would have been difficult to explain the religion to the non-believer by writing, "I wondered then, if without the language barrier, my classmates and I could have done a better job making sense of Christianity, an idea that sounds pretty far-fetched to begin with."
Sedaris also accounts a conversation with his french teacher in which a dispute over the traditions and stories of Easter arises. Sedaris believes in the traditional American version involving the death of Christ, the resurrection, and the ascension to heaven all celebrated by hiding eggs, eating chocolate, and the arrival of the Easter rabbit. Hist teacher, however, believes in the French version in which a bell flies from Rome and delivers the sweets. After debating the practicalities of each story, Sedaris comes to a realization that he is basing his information on nothing more than pure faith, as is his instructor. To highlight the point that anything is believable under the wide umbrella of faith, Sedaris states, "In communicating any religious belief, the operative word is faith... I accepted the idea that an omniscient God had cast me in his own image and that he watched over me and guided me me from one place to the next. The virgin birth, the resurrection, and the countless miracles--my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe."
The essay touches on a couple of important facts to keep in mind whence studying religions. The first is that when explaining any religion to someone who is not of the faith, it is certain that the ideas portrayed will indeed sound strange as illustrated by the incident involving the Muslim girl. Secondly, faith is a powerful thing because it requires nothing in the form of scientific or physical proof, only a whole-hearted belief in something. If one may believe in one thing without proof, then another can believe in any other thing without proof. It is important to keep this in mind when studying religion because rather than pointing out the preposterous nature of certain stories, students of religion should be looking at the history and function of such ideas. Nothing is preposterous when one bases their facts on whatever they wish to provide as proof.