Then why not present it as such. "It looks like ..." "It seems to me ..." "What I cannot help thinking are fantasies."
I think the net is a hot medium, and just impresses people as aggressive.
I got contentious on the religion forum when I logged onto a thread and read someone completely mischaracterizing in an aggressive, hostile, and mendacious way our teaching on the Eucharist. The kindest possible construction that could be places on this was uncaring ignorance and a presumption that Catholic teaching ought to be condemned not understood, and any condemnation would do. Sweeping and sweepingly untrue statements couched in the rhetoric of certainty seem to be the norm
Darn, gotta go.
I think I use such qualifiers MOST of the time--probably over 95% of the time?? Haven't counted. CERTAINLY THAT IS MY ATTITUDE as I write. I think that's discernable.
I think the net is a hot medium, and just impresses people as aggressive.
And, Dear Bro, all the more so when we have sacred cows and shoulder chips involved that we have a death grip on. And those hazards warrant some fierce highlighting whatever the means. imho.
I got contentious on the religion forum when I logged onto a thread and read someone completely mischaracterizing in an aggressive, hostile, and mendacious way our teaching on the Eucharist. The kindest possible construction that could be places on this was uncaring ignorance and a presumption that Catholic teaching ought to be condemned not understood, and any condemnation would do. Sweeping and sweepingly untrue statements couched in the rhetoric of certainty seem to be the norm
It's certainly a reasonable assertion that there's an overabundance of that.
We catch the same our direction.
And, frankly, the different constructions on reality have such perspectives inherently as part of them. And one has, objectively, more or less as much right to be stated forcefully as the other.
I think one of the reasons that I mostly leave The Lord's Supper alone . . . is that I recognize that the sensitivities are so extreme . . . and the 'sacred cowness' of the perspective s so intense . . . little to no dialogue is likely to be possible. And, I don't KNOW that it makes a lot of eternal difference for RC's to construe it their way and Proties to construe it ours. I think IF it were that crucial, God would have made it SUPER ABUNDANTLY CLEARER.
I don't prefer to get my whities in a wad over muddy theology based on muddy fuzzy Scriptural foundations.