A Couple of Things

I need to get a couple of things off my chest. Not that I expect any relief from having done so.

Here's the first one: Yesterday I "unfriended" someone on Facebook because all (as opposed to "virtually all") of her posts have become political messages. I know she has many more dimensions than her political position (which happens to be similar to mine, as a matter of fact), and frankly I was tired of reading about just this one thing, not only one time each day but multiple times.

How many times do we need to shout out our political position? Is there really some expectation that doing so will convince someone in the other camp to defect? Someone who is so engrossed in proclaiming his own position that he can't possibly pay attention to ours?

Political propaganda is everywhere. It is interrupting the Olympics, it pops up on my Scrabble games for crying out loud, and the ads are all over the internet. Not to mention the telephone. Do we really have to have it as hourly daily messages from our "friends"?

Okay, enough on that.

Now here's the other thing. I've thought about this one for quite a while and am still not sure I can articulate it properly. It is what I've come to call "The 'C' Card."

You know what I mean, the statements (both verbal and written) that begin, "Well, as a Christian . . . "  Starting off a statement this way does two bad things. First, it pretty much tries to shut up anything anyone else has to say because how would that person respond? "Well, as an agnostic . . . ?" or "Well, as a Christian myself  . . . . ?" It really is designed as a conversation stopper. And the other bad thing is that it claims the absolute authority of God. Which is huge. There are many schools of theology within the Christian faith, some of which are contradictory to each other. How outrageously presumptive would a person have to be to know without a shadow of a doubt God's precise position on every single issue?

God must be sitting there, shaking her head, realizing yet again how even more incurvatus in se we have become.