I'm angry, and I can blog if I want. If you are a Christian (a child of God), if you take Jesus as your living Lord, and take the Bible as His inspired Word to you, and IF you are also a biological child of an unbelieving parent, mayhap you can sympathize with something in this.
My 9-year-old son must have commented about something he knows from the Bible...and my dad had to take it up and challenge him on the validity of his belief. No mercy, attack the young believer with that subtly ridiculing tone of voice, "are you quite sure about that?" Back comes the unsuspecting, earnest boy with the backup, and then Grandpa retreats to his stock stance: the high and dry ground of disbelief. "Well," he states, "it doesn't really matter whether the stories in the Bible are literally true or not, since they are just there to teach some principle or other." I suppose I could have called my son out of his presence and into mine on some pretense or other. But I did not. Instead I sailed in, with the imperative of the moment.
It certainly does matter, that the accounts in the Bible are able to be taken as true, literally as well as principally. For crying out loud, every word Jesus taught, that I ever read, was based on some literal, concrete example that people at large could relate to their own lives, and it helped the principle to be better grasped. You are not to tell my son, by implication or inference, that the words I read to him from the Bible are not trustworthy, and that therefore, the principles they seem to illustrate, somehow are. And then forth came the stream of abuse about MY "convoluted thinking."
I didn't get far with the examples of biological literalism in the Creation story, or the Garden of Eve or the Flood...I never do. Once a man decides he will not consider a thing, you cannot discuss it.
Once a man has decided that the Bible in ALL its forms and translations is merely a Roman Catholic device for world subjugation to emperors and kings and other State tyrants, I am an idiot for subscribing to anything in it. I have been sold a bill of goods put together by the Liberals who just needed to scare me into good behavior.
*sigh* Eventually, I walked out of it.
And he was so annoyed with me for trying at all, that he had to make the parting salvo. He said he had a good idea for me that I'd "probably blow off faster than you did my idea about Adam and Eve." I should find some courses in Russian to audit at Colgate up the road, in order to prepare myself for a successful life in commerce and industry in what is left of the free world, when my divorce gets settled. His revenge? "If you don't, you'll be wasting all of what you got at Smith [College]." And then he was out the door.
Well thank you, for that cheapest of all cheap shots. Usually, it is jerks like my abuser-husband, his dad and his brother, I have to stand up to and try to explain that training can certainly be "wasted," but education cannot, ever. Education becomes a part of a person's fabric, and most of that does not come from the books one reads or the lectures one attends. The irony here, is that my dad sent both me and my younger brother to college "to get an education, NOT to get JOBS." Jobs, spoken with the fullest measure of derision, like you would never want to go get a job somewhere, when you could sit around and think and just be superior by dint of having things to ponder. But he changed his tune, along about the final month of my senior college year, as he began to realize that his philosophy may have been folly, and that it was about to graduate a young woman with tremendous capabilities and capacities, and no "nobler" aim for any of it than to get married and have children. As if, all careers ever devised, are not ultimately pursued for the purpose of supporting the nurture of children, someone's, somewhere.
So for him to shoot out that I am wasting my education if I don't become some bigwig in the commerce and industry of the free world, after divorce, is to say that I have been wasting my education all along, by not becoming a bigwig in commerce and industry. Keep sneering and snickering at my efforts to become proficient in making soap and figuring out how to market it successfully. It must be too low-brow, to hoi-polloi, to make a disposable product all-naturally with my own hands, from the land....only if I am the corporate guy on Wall Street raking in futures on soap, do I have any business to talk about something so humble as soap.
"If you want to own property and be a success, you're not going to make it in teaching. That's going to be done in the sphere of commerce and industry." Never mind that I have never wanted to be that sort of a success, never mind, for that matter, that HE HAS NEVER ONCE SPOKEN TO US WITH RESPECT OF THE "SUCCESSES" ANYONE MAKES IN THOSE SPHERES....NEVER MIND THAT HE ALWAYS SPEAKS OF CORPORATE ACTIVITY AS TYRANNICAL, EXPLOITATIVE, AND THE REST...AND THEN TURNS ABOUT AND BLASTS "THE LIBERALS" FOR TRYING TO REGULATE CORPORATE ACTIVITY OUT OF EXISTENCE, THEREBY ENSLAVING THE FREE WORLD AND KEEPING IT FROM THE BENEFITS OF CAPITALISM!
I guess he has just decided, that since I am not a success with my family, while four of my children are plainly (and I have to believe, temporarily) sided with my abuser and tormentor and want nothing to do with me, I must therefore switch gears and become a totally differently-geared sort of person, reinvent myself for success.
Whatever that is.
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