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Greetings I see that various others have already responded
appropriately to your posts. But the target is so juicy that I can’t
resist piling on. (For those on the list who are unfamiliar with American
colloquialisms, “piling on” is a foul in our national
sport of “football”. It is called by the referree when a
player needlessly jumps on a person (or “pile” of people) that are
lying on the ground after being tackled. Obviously, besides being
unsportsmanlike, it creates the danger of needless injury—even “needless”
as defined by the one of the most violent and injury-prone sports known to man.) One of the problems in our society is that people have taken
something that is good, for instance, calling religious people on their
imposition of overbearing morality, and turned it into a fetish. For
instance, any mention of things religious or the display of religious symbols
is fetishized as “bilble thumping” or “religious bigotry”
or “imposing morality.” I’m sorry to say, Another instance of this is the slide from calls by a
minority (like atheists) for tolerance from a majority (like Christians) into
intolerance by the minority of any _expression_ by the majority. The wonder
of countries like the As I believe Robert (and perhaps others) pointed out, there
was no proselytizing content in either Dave Laird’s posts or in
mine. In fact, both posts (even Dave’s!) were remarkably free of
moralizing. And our discussion of religious history was pretty much
fact-based—or at least an attempt to be fact-based. If you believe
that either of us got facts wrong, we would welcome the education. (I
suppose you could say that Dave’s post implied some moralizing about the
harm drugs can do. And I suppose you *could*
interpret one sentence of mine about the Reformation period as suggesting that
corruption had crept into the church rather than simply being a statement that
those trying to reform the church were attempting to reform the corruption they
perceived. But other than that, there really wasn’t any statement
implying which is good or which is evil or which was better than another.
It was simply “this is what happened and this is why.”) That discussion of history IS on topic in this list—even
for the topics which you appear to be interested in. How can we possibly
discuss how (or whether) “the world is going to hell in a handbasket”
without discussing the history of how we got here (or the history of
handbaskets that the world has been in before)? How can we possibly
discuss It’s the freedom, stupid! Gun control: tyrants’ tool, fools’ folly.
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