Posts here reminding me of my own journey in life…….(narcissistic post….
- spend the better part of 18 years discussing religion away from work
- go to seminary for a Masters
- never, ever discuss religion ever again with anyone
With 99% of people it’s POINTLESS, and I’m not exaggerating. No matter how polite or nice or calm you are, people are ready to strangle you over the fact that if you disagree with them about something, they take it like you’re telling them the Grandma who read them the Bible on her knee was wrong about something and you deserve to die.
Well, she was but it doesn’t make her a bad person.
Let me put it like this: l get the same cringe feeling of despair when someone wants to tell me the old “I studied” as if seminary training isn’t, you know, STUDYING that l get from the “do research” anti-vaxxers (while my specialty is NOT vaccination, I’ve taken 3 high level Immunology courses, one Infectious Disease course and a masters level course in Molecular Diagnostics to go with 30 years of turning out reports on clotting factors).
Now to be clear: that does not automatically make me right and you wrong while discussing a religious subject, but you also have to accept that odds are very high that I have already heard your argument. And one thing you find the higher you go in academia studying it, the more gray exists in a number of areas. (Beyond a physical return of Jesus being prophesied, I cannot tell you anything about the future but Johnny who memorized Revelation can tell you how the 1991 Gulf War fits into it).
The epitaph of “spent 26 years studying, graduated, never used what he’d learned” occasionally depresses me. But it’s more in finding attempts at discussion pointless.
Continue with your lives everyone. (This has come up 3x this week so it’s not just about here).
ETA: much like in politics, people will make up on the spot pretty much any argument on this subject.