Sometimes I get ornery about nothing and people say I got a bee in my bonnet. It usually turns out to be a wasp in my ten-gallon hat. When I get an itch in the britches – and it’s not “the itch” (Deut 28:27) – I find the best way do deal with the little annoyance is to write about it.
Sometimes the itch is about misinformation, by neglect to verify something, and sometimes from poor scholarship. Sometimes it turns out to be giving information that is intentionally wrong. One time when I heard some incorrect claim in a sermonette. I mentioned this to another member, who responded with something like, “You should tell Mr. — his mistake, he would really appreciate getting his facts set straight”. Hmm. Like in the Spokesman’s Club “Get the facts!” speech?
One ‘sermonette fact’ was given in hysteria over gay teachers in public schools (not celibate teachers in Catholic schools). At that time, and in that city, evidence showed the exact opposite of what ‘fact’ and what the speaker implied. Some years ago a COG leader claimed, “Evolutionists are running scared of Intelligent Design!” Actually, scientists were exuberant at having unmasked ID as rebadged Creationism. They even showed books that were edits of older texts, with theistic terms replaced by benign ID jargon. A non-COG minister used fabricated facts in a debate over evolution; his opponent charged him with “Lying for God”, as if the ends justified the means (like in the “Proof of the Bible”).
A problem with some “proofs” is that parts of verses are patched together like axiomatic proofs of Euclidean geometry. Our dependency on HWA’s “proofs” slowly began to unravel after his demise, and without them, the WCG fell apart. About the only thing that remained was his autocratic form of rule.
And here is one that always gets me peeved – a minister at one of the COGs on the Silenced.co “Dying” list keeps trying to “disprove” Global Climate Change, and for no stated reason – though I privately speculate it’s seen as being contrary to “God controls the weather”. Admittedly, governments have really made a mess of carbon trading, burp tax (penalty on methane emission), alternative energy, and so on, and Al Gore told a few inconvenient whoppers.
A recent rant had to do with the ships frozen in Antarctic waters. Of course it’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, some Australian states are suffering a heat wave, but Antarctica being cold disproves global warming. Despite the ice-locked ships, there were news reports of record high temperatures in Antarctica (but unconfirmed). The official summer record high temperature at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole base was in 2011, minus12 degrees C. Still cold, but warm compared to the average warm season temperature of minus 35 degrees C. Even with Global Warming, Antarctica is still cold in the summer – colder than the Artic. And ice still melts at 0 degrees C…
Well, that itch has gone, and the bee turned out to be a just a mosquito.
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