I have to do some serious thinking. Do I REALLY want to keep slamming my head against the brick walls here? God help me, sometimes I think defending against the Arian heresy would have been a picnic compared to the slime being thrown around here.
You're where I was about a month ago. Take some time to reflect, but don't give up entirely.
I was essentially called "crazy" in the Andrea Yates thread, and when I defended myself, I was accused of taking everything personally and becoming hostile and defensive. When I bowed out of one thread, one of my contenders gave himself a row of "claps" like he'd won the Heavyweight championship.
Now I apparently have given my heartiest endorsement to allowing pedophiles run rampant throughout the ranks of the Catholic Church, to prey on defenseless little children everywhere.
I just read through the length of the Andrea Yates thread, and I have to admit that you hung in there a lot longer than I would have.
But it's essentially the same thing as the pedophile priest thread.....the bottom line seems to be that nobody wants to show these people any forgiveness or mercy; they've done wrong, they've hurt people, they've murdered chirldren, so by God,
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!!!
I don't know whether this is a reflection of the "Me Me Me, I'm a victim, I have my rights, I'm not getting my due" syndrome so prevalent in American society over the last 30 years or so, or whether it's a hard-line reflection of the Calvinist "total depravity, therefore, show no mercy but go forth and slay" doctrine; but what it boils down to is, if you say that these people are guilty, and that they are deserving of punishment---but that they should also be shown the slightest amount of mercy because
that's what Christ asks us to do, then you're going to bucking upstream, because most people want blood in these cases, they want vengeance, they want to see teeth, hair, and eyeballs on the sidewalk, they want somebody's head impaled on a pikestaff. There's no shades of grey here. Just stark black and white. Show no mercy, take no prisoners, beware thou the mutant.
This stuff hurts. All I really want to do is share how much I love God and how wonderful my faith has been to me.
{{{{{{{{VOW}}}}}}}}} Take heart, VOW.
And remember: the next time you feel like you have been viciously assaulted by someone who was specifically aiming to hurt you, keep in mind something a dear friend of mine in college once said: "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity."
