The Pastime that Never Really Ends

One of my favorite pastimes is reading/listening to someone who hasn't the foggiest notion what in the sam hill he is talking about lecture forth, gloriously unaware what a fool he is making of himself. I know, I know; seems almost a bit cruel, doesn't it? Wouldn't it be nice, wouldn't be charitable to enlighten a poor fellow like that, to gently correct his misunderstandings?

Of course it would. But one of the things that makes these people absolutely hysterical is that they will almost automatically reject the input of anyone more knowledgeable on the subject of the day than they themselves are--unless, of course, said input agrees with their already-uttered opinions. So, for example, when it comes to Christianity and poverty, they will listen to Jim Wallis; when it comes to Christianity and homosexuality, they will listen to Barry Lynn; they will never, not at any time, listen to you (even if your stock of learning on a given subject dwarfs theirs) or to anyone whom you recommend. They will insist that their chosen authorities are the only acceptable authorities, despite rather obviously being completely unequipped to judge whether their authorities know what they are talking about! This makes them marvelously un-correctable, so to speak.

So you wind up with the amusing spectacle of people who have, for example, rather clearly never actually read the whole Bible, lecturing Christians who have read it--and commentaries along with it, in more than a few cases--over and over and over again that the multiple Biblical injunctions to God's people to care for the poor actually amount to injunctions for the state to care for the poor--accepting, briefly, for the sake of argument that what the state does to for the poor is actually "care"; people who have never read either the Bible or the Qu'ran lecturing Christians that Christians and Muslims worship the same god (sometimes Mormons get dragged into this discussion, too!); people who've barely read the Constitution (if at all), let alone The Federalist Papers, lecturing others on the meaning of the General Welfare clause, the Tenth Amendment, the First Amendment, and the Second Amendment; and so forth. It would not be difficult to supply many more examples.

Fortunately for my pursuit of this pastime, I have a more-or-less continual supply of such shenanigans coming to me via the good graces of Google Reader.