This backstabbing isn't a surprise but what can you say when someone DEFENDS SLAVERY, makes statements like "And nothing you or I will change that" for conversation and dwells about some death rate as being under 1% when a pandemic has killed what must be nearing 25,000 Americans.
Whoa. Slow down. Take a deep breath and step away from your keyboard for a minute. All people are seeking is fairness and consistency, not you agreeing with every word they post, nor should you seek that they agree with every word you post.
@TomSea Yours is a tough job, to eliminate that which is universally offensive, break up fights, and clean up various and sundry inappropriate content. It can be hard to draw that line, especially if you let your personal feelings step in.
But there will be disagreement, even on what may be inappropriate.
After all, If we all agreed on everything, one person would post and the rest of the thread would be
We're doing more than that, here. We're drawing from a wide variety of sources, some I believe to be mostly accurate, some I seriously doubt are worth the paper they aren't printed on, and many with obvious political or profit motivated agendae.
That's what we're here to do. Look at it all. Hash out the difference between the credible and the nonsense, to separate the wheat from the chaff, not in terms of individuals so much as sources, and in terms of the information available out there.
There's a ton of 'information', and it's mostly garbage, depending on the source, but there are pearls in that hog lot.
We, collectively, drawing on the often specialized knowledge and the intelligence of folks here, have the ability to use our capacity for critical thinking and weigh the value of the sources, the merit of the statements, to find what was removed from context and distorted and restore it to the logical framework it was pried from, to make it rhetorically whole, so it can be properly assessed. This is the power we have
as a group.
Even then, we will not always draw the same conclusions from the same data. There would be few scientific journals if everyone did, nothing to debate, all would be Q.E.D.
But life is messy. So, too is knowledge, and even more so, the path to wisdom, cluttered with discarded presumptions and fallacies and foibles once held dear, but now known to be too cumbersome for the ascent to clear thought and unvarnished truth.
But part of that truth, especially in this context, is an inevitability.
Life is deadly. No one gets out alive.
It is a question of when and how, not IF our lives will end.
We do our best to give good account of ourselves while we're here, to hopefully leave a legacy for those we leave behind, either in tradition, spirit, riches in character, honor, or material goods, or all of those--some cause to remember us, and for those of us who care, to serve our Creator as best we can while we are here.
Though we may disagree on this fine point, every life which ends, when and where it ends, is part of His plan, and in my estimation, that includes my own life. No man knows his time. I have had plenty of opportunities to die, just have managed to avoid using them, at times by very thin margins, often without any injury at all.
When my time comes it will as likely be because of something silly as something of profound impact, but until that time (my time) comes, He protects me. He knows that time, not me. In Him is my faith, and I just keep my eyes open to help Him out a little.
These are difficult times with great emphasis on a disease we see as killing (so far in the US) as many as might inhabit a small town (by urban standards). It isn't over yet. We do not know what fate may have awaited these people otherwise, and it is moot. We do know (despite claims of irrelevancy) that many times more die each year of other causes, but because of the novel, unknown, and frankly terrifying and seemingly random nature of this disease, we take fright all out of proportion to it's track record, when driving to stores in quest of something to wipe our bum might actually be more hazardous, even with the reduction in traffic.
Some of us have tried to interject some perspective to quell the all too human sense of panic we feel when our Limbic Brain steps in, screaming at our higher cortical functions to fight or flee, in an effort to restore that which makes us separate from the lower animals aside from an immortal soul--the ability to reason.
There are other minds out there, seeking answers, asking good questions, looking for solutions, just as there are those who seek to distort our view of that which is going on around us. It is up to us to discern, as best we can, who is who, and what is what, and it doesn't hurt to keep some semblance of a sense of humour along the way.
