Jack Pelham

Have you considered the possibility that someone can be right by accident, believing a true thing, but doing so based on faulty fact, logic, and sourcing?

Uh, friend,
You are, yourself,
Caught up in the very
Artifice and scheme of which
You are warning everyone else here.
If it is so important that they all
Should be warned about it―
And I’m not saying that
It’s not, mind you―
It is not equally
Important for
You to be
Wholly
Freed
Of it,
Too?

At 10 years old, troubled Jeffrey had not yet learned much of the concept of good and evil. Having little of the concept themselves, his parents hadn’t considered it important to teach him much other than to do chores for them―and not to bother them, of course.

He chalked up to mystery some things
That might otherwise have been solved,
Even as he considered solved some things
That God had intended still to be mysteries.

Whoever shall we blame
When the neglect and cheating
We have been thus far content to tolerate
Have grown insufferable and
Too big to ignore?

He was not friendly,
And I am left to decide
What to make of that fact―
Whether he is never friendly,
Or whether it was just today―
And whether it was his specific
Response to me, or whether it had
Nothing whatsoever to do with me at all.

And I doubt whether in that unfriendly moment,
The man had had any idea what wondering
It would unleash in this inquiring mind.
And I have probably given it more
Thought already than he will
Give it for the rest of this
Most beautiful day.

That church of yours has sure got
A strong conviction about how the women
Need to submit to the men.
It’s as if that conviction were God-powered―
Set on fire by the Spirit of God himself,
And burning bright within your souls,
Always to be honored, and never questioned.

And how interesting this is, for
I have seen a grievous evil under the sun, inasmuch as
That church of yours seems simultaneously clueless
To the fact that the very same God has commanded
All the men to submit to Christ in everything―
Including how they treat the women and children.

People are messy, and once you’ve got some years under your belt, it’s really not all that hard to find some fault in what they say or do, in their attitudes or beliefs about things. If you pay much attention at all to someone, it’s likely that it won’t be long at all before you know better than something they’re doing, thinking, or saying. And at the moment you realize that you know better, if you’re like most people, you’re very likely to make some irrational leaps in your mind. You can easily make the unjustified mental leap from “I know better in this…” to other thoughts and attitudes such as:

1. “I know better in this…therefore, I know better about everything than this person does.”
2. “…therefore, I’m a better person than this person is.”
3. “…therefore, I know pretty much everything, more or less, about the topic in question.”
4. “…therefore, I should be a teacher of, or an authority on this topic.”
5. “…therefore, we should start a new organization based on this.”

All that suffering in your life
At the hands of imperfect people,
And you decided you’d had enough―
That love just wasn’t worth it
If there was going to be any further
Chance of pain.

I saw this meme posted on Facebook and what follows is my response.

The meme seems to presuppose that people are either 100% real or 100% fake, when in actuality, we are a mixed bag—maybe 100% real about this, but not about that.