It seems TEWSNBN is seeking to gain some rather big mileage from one offhand post I made during a patch where I was frustrated and annoyed. He’s extrapolated an awful lot from one small post, and in doing so, to use a term he uses a lot (albeit without explaining himself) he distorts what I said. But whereas TEWSNBN never elaborates upon my alleged distortions of his points or faith, allow me to explain why he is distorting my post.

1. My post has nothing to do with me being married, so I have no idea why he mentioned that. Is he projecting maybe?

2. He falls back to the notion that I want to force my views upon others. Oddly enough, I’m not part of an organisation that will actively try to convert people. I’ve never approached strangers in the street to talk about my beliefs, but I have been approached by people wanting to talk about Jesus, and one of them wanted to discuss my sex life! Organised religion routinely tries to force itself upon people. These days its in trying to turn secular countries into theocracies, irrespective of what people want, and historically wars have raged in bids to force one version of a religion down the throats of others. TEWSNBN often calls the LGBT community selfish for having the audacity to exist. It’s rather ironic really.

3. TEWSNBN says I’m looking in a mirror because I’m reacting to people who think just me (in that he thinks I want to force people to live in the way I want). Sometimes I do hate myself, but not for the reasons TEWSNBN so hastily and inaccurately assumes. You see, I’m not like him and I don’t wish to force my views on others. He could have asked why I posted what I posted, but that appears to have been beyond him. He wants complete conformity to his version of Christianity, and is highly judgemental towards anyone that doesn’t agree with him.

Case in point, his typically snarky, aggressive comment: Just include yourself in that description as you are far from perfect.

I don’t recall claiming to be perfect, and I wasn’t aware this kind of remark was the good response of a good, pious Christian. He’s come at me with a lengthy post, in response to something that had nothing to do with me, and all for what? To attack my character? To attack points I’ve never actually made? Distortion indeed…

Anyway, here is a more comprehensive response, and a challenge to TEWSNBN:

Occasionally I’ve lamented about my experiences working in retail, or my encounters with the public in general. I’d be putting it mildly if I said the experiences have been painful, frustrating and even rage-inducing. Anyone who has worked in retail will probably share my views – anyone who’s worked in any kind of customer-facing environment will probably share my views. Sometimes, between these experiences and the bad days that any of us can suffer, it leads us to make comments that in more restrained moments, we’d realise sound foolish. Case in point, this post of mine: People are annoying, difficult and confusing. They create problems, sometimes by existing.

It was a short, snappy post, coming from a place of bad mood and a long day made more irritating by the public. It wasn’t my finest hour but it’s also a reflection of the state of mind I was in when I made the post, and I don’t tend to delete posts. Call it raw, call it a glimpse into my mind on a bad day, call it whatever you want, but it was the product, as I said, of a little bad patch. In a sense, it was a case of ‘firing and forgetting’, for I’ve moved on since.

Note the date of that post. The 30th of October.

Halfway through November, TEWSNBN decided (clearly it was a slow month for reflecting upon the good and the holy in fundie Christian land) to bring the post up. He’d posted a typically snarky, very un-Christ-like comment shortly after I’d made my post, but I figured he’d not bother about after that. Clearly I was wrong. TEWSNBN must have ran out of sermons, commentary on Christianity and God and Jesus, and might have been bored, because he decided to draw a lot of mileage with this one. His post, whilst not especially lengthy by his standards, was far more verbose (and typically of TEWSNBN, thoroughly off the mark) than my twelve-word, two-sentence post.

I wasn’t going to analyse his post in detail, but you know what? I might do exactly that. Whereas TEWSNBN has acted out of… pettiness? Dishonesty (more on that regular trait of his in a moment), I act out of a desire to challenge and confront his increasing hostility. Let’s start with this baffling remark:

If we were to take him literally, we would say that he would support any extermination camps like the ones Hitler employed during his reign as dictator. But we don’t.

We’re invoking Godwin’s Law already?! That was quick. TEWSNBN is shooting from the hip here, but as is to be expected with such scattergun tactics, his shots miss wildly. I don’t see any reasonable grounds to even hint that I would take such a position – but I imagine TEWSNBN will hide behind his qualifier. It’s also kind of ironic that TEWSNBN would make such an argument, given Hitler’s well-documented religious upbringing.

Instead, he is just vocalizing the frustration everyone feels, especially married couples, when things go off-kilter at times. While Christians could be lumped into his generalization, it is highly doubtful that Christians are the source of his main problems.

Most likely, he is looking in a mirror and reacting to people who are just like him. Wanting everyone else to change to their way of thinking and acting. Instead of changing his view of people and how he treats them, he wants to dictate to others how they should live.

We know this because he has told us many times how he wants the people of the world to act. He says those ideas after he rejects changing to Jesus’s ways. He does not want to humble himself and change.

He, like so many others, want to be the boss and force their faulty ideas and morals on the rest of the world. He is not alone in that way of thinking and you can come up with a lot more examples if you try.

Ah this old, ignorant chestnut. I don’t believe I have ever argued that everyone should come around to my way of thinking. I have never told others how to live – that’s more TEWSNBN’s speed. He expects everyone to become not only Christian, but to become his version of it, and for rejecting his demands, everyone else is selfish. No doubt he will fall back upon his unique interpretation of ‘distortion’, and as always, he won’t explain what I’m distorting or how.

So, my challenge to TEWSNBN is thus: demonstrate it is my desire to force others to live by what I want (in other words, he needs to demonstrate I think like him). He should quote from my posts and comments as a form of evidence to support his argument. He can also define what it means to distort something, then explain how I’m distorting his arguments. It’ll be interesting to see if he can meet either one of those terms.

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