RE: If I were an Atheist
May 12, 2015 at 4:46 pm
(This post was last modified: May 12, 2015 at 5:00 pm by Hatshepsut.)
(May 12, 2015 at 2:53 am)whateverist Wrote: From my occasional visit to Christian sites I can completely understand why you're here. Taking you in is the only Christian charitable thing to do...
There are good Christian informational sites. (Bible Gateway is fully searchable by topic and finds words occurring near each other without needing an exact string. It also has Hebrew, Greek, and several modern languages. It's free to use.) But worthwhile Christian forums are scarce. I'm not that heavy into Church anymore to begin with and won't go to one that pushes religiosity too far. Like what you said about atheists, it's only one part of living. There's the River Jordan and the dentist and so on...
(May 12, 2015 at 11:31 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: What's amusing about Hatepshut is his apparently completely unconscioius hypocrisy: how sensitive he is to non-PC remarks shot across his bow, how eager he is to play the victim by claming they were meant to be direct hits...
It's pretty damn obvious they were shots. I don't think I got hit, though. Or, if I did, you've "kissed it better" for me.
I might understand a little more, at the gut level, about PC and how it came into being than younger folks do. That's one benefit of having been around before PC was taken for granted. We had book titles like Man and His World. As if women didn't exist. It was salesmen, firemen, Congressmen, and the "neuter" pronoun was of course "he." I don't want to return to that world; PC did replace a bullshit system that reflected views (gender inequality) inconsistent both with our constitutional guarantees (14th Amendment equality before the law) and the changed social world where women being housewives and hubby being the breadwinner is no longer idealized.
But PC does bring its own foibles with it. One is the lost art of what was called "the stiff upper lip" (British) or "sucking it up" (USA). Today, people are easily offended and they let all their feelings hang out in public alongside all the dirty laundry. That as well replaced another bullshit system, where we expected things bottled up and swept under the carpet (meaning crimes like date rape and child beating were unconscionably protected behind walls). As a society, we swing from pillar to post, however. We invent a term, "microaggression," meaning that a wrong look, if the recipient suspects it's motivated by hidden racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, ..., then it must be called out and thrashed instantly. We dare not let the smallest transgression slip in our pursuit of perfectionism. When someone does appear to show sensitivity, we have no idea if it's genuine or forced. As PC and its sensitivity requirements get steadily more complex, the number of possible transgressions grows exponentially. This habit makes civility hard to maintain.
There is something Mormons call "moderation in all things" and Buddhists call "the middle way."