Article about Westboro clan dropout Megan Phelps-Roper should be a prerequisite to participating

[Renew Deal]

in this group.

It was posted by Brickbat a couple days ago: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027356205

There are lessons for everyone about respect, understanding, patience, tolerance, prejudice, struggle, and other matters. I highly recommend reading the entire thing.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/conversion-via-twitter-westboro-baptist-church-megan-phelps-roper

[mr blur]

1. Are you serious? Really? Tell you what -

you persuade the believers and faitheists who come here to be outraged by anything they can find to challenge their prejudices to understand something about tolerance and diversity then you might have a starting point for suggesting some kind of "prerequisite" for daring to speak in here.

[Renew Deal]

2. Did you read the entire thing?

[mr blur]

9. Yes I did. I have no problem with the article, just with you lecturing us on behaviour.

[Renew Deal]

15. I'm sorry if it came off that way

I have no intention to lecture about behavior. I think the article is very powerful. I was impressed that people were able to get through to someone that is responsible for the worst behavior in our society by being nice. I saw the article a couple days before, but after the latest incident I thought it was worth sharing.

[skepticscott]

20. In the first place

this was not "the worst behavior in our society" or anything even close. Or were you not paying attention to what happened in Paris last week?

And they didn't get through by "being nice". They got through by exposing idiotic religious beliefs to the light of reason. And even then, it took years to penetrate the thickheadedness of religious fundamentalism about even the simplest things.

[DreamGypsy]

3. Yes, it is possible to escape from many years of indoctrination. But what I really liked...

...about the story was the New Yorker's wonderful selection of accompanying cartoons, especially this one -
a much improved version of the Garden of Eden myth:

This next one was brilliant, but a little harder to connect to the story...though maybe a metaphor for a misguided old misanthrope leading the innocent into a life of hate???? (Well, that's probably a bit of a stretch )

“You see where Sixth Avenue meets Broadway? That’s where you want to be.”

Otherwise the young lady's tale was a bit of a depressing read.

The rest of the cartoons:

“Damn straight—if the food chain ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

“It’s all marketing—no one actually wears that stuff.”

“The guy that knows about the books isn’t here today. I’d be more than happy to suggest a bookmark.”

“I’m just here for the dental.”

Life would be much less enjoyable without New Yorker cartoons.

[Lordquinton]

4. The fruit in the garden of Eden was a Pomegranate

Apple was a generic term for fruit and time + language we get the apple that it is today.

[DreamGypsy]

7. Gee. I must have missed the paper in Qadmoniot where archeologists reported...

...disinterring Eve's body and discovering pomegranate seeds in her gut. Or perhaps there is a newly discovered YouTube video interview with the serpent where it discusses the forbidden fruit that was consumed.

It is difficult to dispute 'facts' that are presented about something that never happened in a place that never existed. The darn forbidden thing might as well have been a cheeseburger.

You are certainly free to view the New York cartoon and replace the contents of the cute little serpent's speech balloon with something like:

The pomegranate is the fruit of a shrub or small tree. Its Latin name is Punica granatum. It is widely cultivated throughout the Middle East and Caucasus region, north Africa and tropical Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and the drier parts of southeast Asia. It is also cultivated in parts of California and Arizona. In recent years, it has become more common in the commercial markets of Europe and the Western Hemisphere. It can be opened by scoring it with a knife and breaking it open, and the seeds can be eaten or cooked after being separated from the peel and internal white pulp membranes .....

I may be wrong, but I think the essential point of the cartoon and of the article about the Westboro apostate is that we should be guiding our understanding and actions by current knowledge and civil behaviors, and not by literal interpretations of obscure, obsolete, and dangerous religious stories and imperatives....

...in the beginning - a poem written by Nick Annis, about the history of the texts comprising the Bible, recited by Chuck Brodsky:

[Lordquinton]

8. Wow, OK, I didn't mean to upset anyone

It's an interesting ethnobotanicnal bit of info that I thought some might enjoy, and yea ironic that someone was using all the Latin names and information about the fruit of knowledge.

Apples come from China, they don't grow well in the middle East, but pomegranates are from there and feature greatly in local mythology (think Hades and Persophonie) the term for apples comes much later and is widely applied (like pineapples and road apples). Plus I had pomegranates on the brain from visiting the Wolfskill experimental clonal germplasm repository on their Pomegranate sampling day.

[AtheistCrusader]

13. Maybe you should couch claims about mythology AS myth, not fact.

Read your first post, note the absence of any sort of qualifier. You spoke as if it was fact.

Doubly distasteful since you took time to mention 'mythology' now.

[Lordquinton]

19. Mythology is based in fact

There were no apples in the middle east at that time, but there were pomegranates and those were honored in many myths. The bible took liberally from neighboring groups. So it is most likely that the forbidden fruit in the story of the garden of Eden was a pomegranate. Does that read better?

[AtheistCrusader]

23. It does read better.

Because it conveys an entirely different meaning.

[TygrBright]

5. I don't know about prerequisites for participation, but it's a very worthwhile read.

Thank you for posting the link.

appreciatively,
Bright

[Iggo]

6. No, thanks.

I spent fifty years tolerating religious bigots. I'm done.

[skepticscott]

10. Before being allowed to participate in this group

should people also be required to acknowledge the lessons of what a toxic and destructive influence religion can be, and of how the religious indoctrination of children can absolutely qualify as abusive? Because they're in there too...in spades.

[Warren Stupidity]

11. Actual requirements for active participation in this group:

Fewer than 5 jury hides in the last 90 days.

Those with more than 5 jury hides in the last 90 days can still participate by reading posts here and engaging in passive-aggressive alerting on those who have managed to retain some modicum of civility.

[AlbertCat]

12. Actual requirements for active participation in this group:

Don't forget the computer!

To participate, one must actually have access to a computer.

[Renew Deal]

16. Shockingly, these days most people are on phones

I juried a post recently on my phone while riding the subway. I lost the internet connection between stops.

[cleanhippie]

17. Your phone is a computer.

[AtheistCrusader]

14. I voted for 'no host at all'. Let Juries moderate. I see I was not wrong.

[trotsky]

18. I don't believe there is a "one size fits all" approach to religious discussions.

Go over to Syria and stroll into an ISIS camp, and talk to them peacefully and respectfully how they are wrong about Islam.

But more in general, there are as many different approaches and methods to these discussions as there are believers and non-believers in the world.

When I was leaving the Lutheran faith I was brought up in, I was floored to read Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, but I also appreciated the essays of Robert Ingersoll. Both helped my mind expand in their own way.

Consider too that the desired outcome isn't always to "convert" one's discussion partner.

[Promethean]

21. So to get away from the meta discussion and on to the article itself.

My favorite quote from the article: "As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking God for Murphy’s death. “I felt like I would be such a jackass to go on and post something like that,” she said."

Empathy: the true god killer.

[skepticscott]

22. Meta discussion

is what the OP wanted.