Thursday, January 24, 2008

Being mean enough to mean a little something

From a comment:
I didn't know where else to post this comment, but I thought it needed to be made.
To put it blatantly, you're a jerk.


If you call me a jerk then I may cry a little tear about it. After all, I'm a person too.

You approach each opinion and article that you refute like the person who wrote it was a clear idiot.

The interesting thing about text is that even if the person who wrote it is an idiot, they may be right because words have to be taken on their own terms. For example, you approach what I write like I am clearly a jerk and yet you apparently believe that I may be correct.

I treat honest idiots who happen to have a low IQ as the result of a disability in their brain with a form of respect, perhaps a little pat on the head.

They are people, wrong or not they deserve some respect.

This is all well and good in theory, yet in fact when you make a judgment you need to have examples in mind. So far all you've said is that a post where I suggest that people do not want to understand is the perfect example of a lack of respect, yet what if many do not want to understand. I wouldn't say that I respect all equally, at any rate.

You won't convince anyone if you're a jerk.

As social patterns in America indicate you'll never convince young men to be "nice" and feminine based on a feminized form of Christianity, instead they'll just leave Christianity.

I'm not sure that my goal is to convince anyone but if it was I wouldn't try to convince men based on how nice I am. You refer to biblical texts yet who knows what its writers might write to people who do not love to speak the truth and seek comfort by avoiding it in the name of love.

A perfect example is in this particular entry. Did you consider that people were actually struggling to understand your writing - that they WANTED to understand it and thus commented about it? ....

I have considered that, which is why I suggested some of the faults typical to my writing. Yet I also noted that they seem to begin to understand enough to know that they do not want to understand as is illustrated by the fact that their comments fail to focus on the facts or issues at hand. Typically they shift from the truth to dealing with whether or not I'm a nice fellow and so on but the truth is that even if I am not a nice fellow facts and logic will still be what they are. I wouldn't say that I'm always a nice fellow anyway.

But that is not the point, the point is that they are not lesser beings – they do not deserve your scorn.

It is because I do not consider them to be lesser beings that I treat what some write with contempt or disdain.

Refute away! Use the brains God had given you – but do so in love – as God has called you to do.

It seems that for you love can be summed up with: "Be nice." If that is your view of love and it is correct then you need to live by your own words because you're already failing by beginning a comment on being nice with: "You're a jerk." For that just doesn't seem nice!

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