Saturday, July 27, 2013

Don't post about that one atheist, please!

I had this post written, nice and neat, ready to post.  Then, I posted a comment on Facebook....
So i had to do a little rearranging, and add a postscript to the end of the post.

Everybody knows* that you can only balance an egg on its end on the equinox.  I'm the idiot who actually balanced an egg on its end one of the other 363 days of the year, cementing my position as a pompass know-it-all. 

I see those urban legends on facebook...the quote mashup that combines interviews from different people and an incorrect claim about a famous psychiatrist.  The amber alert for a kid kidnapped three years ago, and safely rescued one day later.  A comparison of two sports champions expressing two different emotions and making a moral conclusion.

It's like scratching a chalkboard.  And with the experience I've had on listservs, online forums, and various blogs...there's no solving it.  There's almost no changing people's perspective.
Ask me about the drinking argument.  The cover two argument.  Any argument I have with my wife.  Just about any facebook post.  If I disagree with you, I come off as an argumentative jerk.

And yet I can't shut up.  I think half of my facebook comments are a cut-and-paste a snopes on a modern parable / urban legend / outdated Amber Alert. 


I'm a firm believer in the Proverb that one person presents his case and seems right...until the other guy brings up the other side...I know it's in the good book somewhere.

And, the other day, a modern-day parable that I couldn't verify.  (A pastor whose name doesn't google, a unnamed megachurch, and an anvil of an aesop that's predictable from a mile away).

I commented
"[citation needed] - my google search can't even find this guy, and one person says that the picture is a different homeless person."
And I got told that I was missing the point (spoiler alert: Matthew 24.).
You wanna tell a story like that, call it a modern parable.  Call it what it is, an urban legend, a modern parable...but when you post it like a fact...


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