Another skeptic here, and I don't think the Spaghetti Stuff is
anything like bullying. If you're going to believe the unbelievable
without question (have faith, they put it) then have the courage of
your convictions, and expect not everybody will agree.
It seems to me the most egregious bullying has come from the religious
people who want me to obey their rules--most recently this whole
abortion/contraception flap. This *isn't* bullying? Do it my way or
else? And since I can't make my own faithful follow the rules, we'll
make it a secular law and make everybody obey? Please. And when
certain politicians fall all over themselves to seize control of my
reproductive system, not just the reproductive systems of their own
female faithful, a little spaghetti ribbing seems very harmless. Of
course, in the old days I'd have been tied to the stake and burned,
which is bullying as ugly as it can be.
But the true believers do try our--uhm, patience? Gravity? A friend
just back from Egypt, herself a Copt, told me that when the Coptic
Pope died while she was there, the faithful propped up the corpse in
all its regalia, mitre, crook in hand, so that the masses could
shuffle by and pay their respects. FOR THREE DAYS. IN EGYPT. We both
had our hands over our faces when she finished.
Match that with your spaghetti, Doug!
Pamela
"...almost everything conspicuously great is great in despite: has
come into being in defiance of affliction and pain; poverty,
destitution, bodily weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand other
obstructions."
"Death in Venice," Thomas Mann
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
