Quote:
|
She compared murder to making fun of someone. And then, when people questioned her statements, she chickened out and left. How exactly do you figure that running away constitutes "defending your argument well"?
|
My electricity is restored now after a few days' outage due to some local twisters (I live in the Chicago area and wind tends to be a problem). My apologies for the apparent absence and neglect of valid replies.
I stated that my analogy was deliberately exaggerated. The perfect analogy is an impossibility, since points of similarity cannot be drawn for every element. If you had points of similarity for every element, the analogy device would be irrelevant. I agree that it was an imperfect analogy. I wasn't trying to tie up all the loose ends--the goal was to make a point, not an afghan.
If you would prefer, I could, without hopefully offending anyone, reduce my analogy from the murder exaggeration one to a lesser and perhaps more universally-understandable offense.
For instance, say I am at a black tie party with some publishers and authors. I am standing at the table and spill caviar on my blouse. I am standing at the table and spill caviar on the host's carpet. I am standing at the table and spill caviar on my favorite author's lapel. These actions would all be bad, but certainly different levels of bad. The consequences would be different. The greatest degree of outcry, public embarrassment, and personal kicking of self would probably come from the caviar spill on the author.
On the human level, I fight temptations to treat people differently and understand many fundamental equalities that are often overlooked. I strive to be tolerant of other viewpoints and believe I am successfully impartial when it comes to looks, background, race, philosophical beliefs, other factors that distinguish one person from another. However, there are some people we honor above others automatically, at least one facet of them if not all--for example, a Queen or our parents or a favorite author. And some people carry (by virtue of their earned or not-earned positions) a certain amount of clout and authority that allows them to make a bigger fuss or enforce more dire consequences against offenders.
So to make a once-short analogy even longer and longer,
All I'm trying to say is it's simply a bigger deal to make fun of a bigger person. God is (by virtue of his earned position as creator/owner of other persons) the bigger person. It is a bigger deal to make fun of him.
Quote:
|
The statement "____ is the one true ____" is like waving a red flag, whether the subjects are Christianity/faith, Apple/computer, Libertarianism/party. In the Cellar, dogma puts you in the doghouse. Even I, in my misspent youth, have flamed and been flamed in return.
|
Yes, I would definitely admit I'm an absolutist on this front. I posit God as the creator of the universe. Not so much because I want to posit that as absolute truth, but because I see no other viable alternative and simply must.
I don't understand people who say THERE ARE NO ABSOLUTES.
In itself, that is an absolutist statement. Why should I swallow that as absolute truth to the exclusion of all other options that contradict it?
If the Cellar gang went to Paris and agreed to meet at the Eiffel Tower but refused to look in its direction and each bought pewter replicas for our pockets as individual "compasses" and found our "own ways" to the Eiffel Tower, we would likely never rendezvous.
I confess to you that I have chosen an absolute truth, and I do filter all other things that claim to be truth THROUGH my God-colored lenses. You may not agree--what I call "absolute truth" may look like a pewter trinket to you, and you might wish I would just keep it to my own pocket. But can you acknowledge that an absolute source of truth is feasible? Why else would we even want our own personal pocket versions of it?