(Don't miss recovering_fan's two posts before mine.)
Whew! Earl described the series of pictures you posted, Fat Man; and I think Iâ??m glad I canâ??t see the last one.
Hello again, Fat Man. May we continue our discussion?
You certainly stated a problem that strikes a chord in the heart of this blind woman when you talked about noise pollution. I hate it when we go into a restaurant and the owner has decided that the real reason we came to the restaurant was to listen to The Game; and, so, the TV is blaring so loudly that the walls vibrate.
But if I might set up a hypothetical situation to illustrate what Iâ??m trying to say, suppose Earl takes me to one of these restaurants where The Game is so loud that I cannot hear the menu being read to me and the waitress treats me as if I were three years old because Iâ??m blind and tries to put a bib on me so that I donâ??t get food on my clothes. (Yes, this actually happened to me once in a restaurant in California.) So, when I go home, I am very irritated; and I have a headache because of The Game.
I then decide to go to my favorite anti-sports website and start a thread to relieve my tension. And since I am irritated, I decide to write about Charles Darwin; but I decide to call him Charles Dumbwin. And in my thread I mock him because he was too squeamish to finish medical school and because he decided to study theology so it would give him more time for his sporting activities.
I then go on a rant about some of my former coworkers when I was teaching who tried to cram evolution down everyoneâ??s throat by loudly talking about it in the teachersâ?? lounge and ridiculing anyone who did not agree with them. I would point out that these were history teachers who were so science-stupid that they wouldnâ??t recognize the scientific method if it walked up and hit them in the face.
I could then talk about Earlâ??s former judo instructor who was an evolutionist (I would call him â??an evil-illusionistâ?) who felt it was perfectly alright to randomly slug his son for no good reason -- survival of the fittest and all that. I could then round off my rant by referring to Joseph Stalin, who believed in evolution and slaughtered millions of people.
After all of that, do you think it would be enough for me to add the disclaimer â??Oh, I know that not
all evolutionists are like thatâ??
The justifiable anger you would feel over my ridiculous rant would be the same sort of anger that Earl and I feel when you make a similar rant about Christians and Christianity.
So, what Iâ??m trying to say is, as Earlâ??s friend you should stop and think before you go on one of these rants about Christianity. â??Is this likely to upset Earl?â? A friend treats another friend with respect and doesnâ??t mock what he believes. Friends can disagree and discuss their disagreements, but they donâ??t ridicule one anotherâ??s beliefs.
I know that you can be civil because you have always been civil to me, and I appreciate that.
In fact, when you donâ??t rant, your posts are very interesting. When you take the time to think about what you are writing, you write very well.
By the way, I donâ??t think your Sunday school teacher should have been given the responsibility of taking care of a bowl of goldfish, much less the responsibility of teaching children about God. Do you think we could lock her in a room with our older daughterâ??s biology professor, who loudly proclaimed that humans do not get calcium from milk and gave extra credit to students who watched his favorite movies? (However, the amount of stupidity in that room might cause some kind of an explosion.)