There are a lot of things that are accurate to say at any given time. Knowing when the appropriate time to say or write them is, and how best to do so, takes the labored attention of love and genuine concern for the people and not the argument. If your daughter comes to you and asks "Daddy, am I ugly?" and she is not very attractive at all, do you think love is best served by saying "Why, yes, honey, you are ugly." You can take all kinds of cold comfort in the fact that you did not lie and were accurate, but you will have missed an opportunity to help your daughter build upon her inner beauty and any interest she will ever have in coming to you about her most deep-seated fears and concerns. You will have won the award for "Mr. Honesty," and lost the more important award for "Super-Dad."
If your comments are offensive or insensitive, the very people you are wanting to win to your argument could not care less about your accuracy. Your comments were, in my opinion, ham-handed and insensitive. No one (again, in my opinion) is attracted to your position due to this.
When Jesus was telling the apostles how people would know who were his true disciples, his refrain was, over and over again in the gospel of John, "they will know you by your love for one another." Is that how people know you on these kind of threads - ones about tragedy and horrible loss of life? Is that the reputation you have earned? Once you have earned that kind of trust with people, then you will know in your heart when the proper time to confront doctrinal (and important) disputes or errors. This thread is not the right one.
it doesn't do any good to pray for the souls of the dead.
I looked back at my post looking for even a hint of me suggesting you or anyone else do so and I cannot divine that in any of my posts. Perhaps I am overlooking something, or maybe you are confusing my post with another.
I’m not sure that I need to apologize for anything I said. I posted what I did in order to clear up some questions about Unitarians that were appearing on the thread.
You make a good point about “they will know you by your love for one another.” But technically speaking, Unitarians aren’t Christians, which is the original point I made.
One component of Biblical love is telling the truth. And that’s what I did. It may seem harsh, but I’ll take care of that in a minute.
So, right, I’m not winning any “Super-Dad” warm-fuzzy-love points. I’m not “Super-Dad” in this situation because I don’t personally know any of the victims.
Let’s be honest here: unless I really missed something in your post on this thread, you have absolutely no connection to any of the victims in this tragedy, either.
If you have a personal connection to the tragedy, I offer my condolences to you and the families.
As a result, I can be dispassionate about the tragedy and have a fair amount of objectivity about it.
What I did was to inform the thread about Unitarianism. It isn’t Christian.
And being a Christian and aware of what God says about situations about like this, I said what I did. And I’d do it again. I’ll provide Bible references if asked.
Biblically speaking, the biggest tragedy here is that there is a group of 200 or so Unitarians that are uninformed, ignorant or worse as to the knowledge of true salvation from their sins. And that’s independent of the Christian-hating gunman.
You’re right - the prayer for the dead was in reference to another post on the thread. Sorry for the confusion.
On the other hand the father could tell the daughter she’s beautiful, define all the ways to measure beauty, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so on and so forth.
Frankly, a father that sees his daughter as being ugly would seem weird to me, even if she was genuinely ugly.
Isn’t it funny how people see things differently?