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[quote name="Denis O\'Bell"][quote name="Ray of Light"] [quote]Jerkcity's point, if you can call it that, is something like: I hate that bitch for reminding me of my own frailty/mortality. Or maybe just: When thinking about something makes me uncomfortable, I weakly feign indifference by making crude, unfunny jokes. There's some of this in GYWO, too.[/quote]Or, maybe it's that the Christian right paints themsevles onto every moral high ground they stumble upon, employing a rhetorical brinkmanship that casts dissent as sinful.[/quote]You need to punch this up a little bit. Your instinct for brevity is good, but here you’re so brief, you lose your point. Dissent from an actually superior moral position IS sinful, right? Perhaps that’s not the sense in which you’re using "moral high ground," though. Also, I think the "stumbling" image doesn’t work, here, and betrays an ignorance of the depth and rigor of Christian thought. Nobody ever read Aquinas and walked away thinking, "He was just making that shit up as he went along." [quote name="Ray of Light"]No matter how good your arguments, there's no headway to be made when your opponents believe that to change their minds is to damn themsevles to hell.[/quote]This is a defense of Jerkcity’s "feeding tube in her cunt" joke? "The Christian Right won’t change their minds, so why should I bother having any kind of mature opinion on the subject?" Please. Your POV is essentially the same as GYWO. Jerkcity is infantile: "If I pretend I don’t care, then the bad thoughts will go away." You and Rees are adolescents: "Terri Schiavo reminds me how much I hate my parents: they’re such hypocrites!" Repressed fears burst out as rage against a scapegoat. You are not alone in this. Obviously some of the protestors are doing something similar. One of the features of adolescent thought is that one often quite resembles what one hates, while fulminating mercilessly against hypocrisy. At least, that’s been my experience. [quote name="Ray of Light"]Having seen the two-thousand-year track record of this play, shrewder commentators content themselves with making fun of Jesus' busybodies and take it on faith (FAITH) that genuinely open minds will get the drift. [/quote]I know the phrase "people who agree with me" doesn’t pack the wallop it should, but "genuinely open minds" is a poor choice of a substitute. After all, if one had a GENUINELY open mind, presumably one would be open to the possibility that there was something in Christianity that deserved better than mockery. Although I suppose one could make the same argument about any idea, even two mutually contradictory ideas. Perhaps there are SOME things it’s better to close one’s mind to, in practice. Perhaps the GENUINELY open-minded are fools. "Fools" obviously doesn’t serve your purposes here, either. I’d suggest "<a href="http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&pid=8824">attractive young white men such as myself</a>," as a seed crystal for brainstorming. [/quote]