(urth) Silk is Calde!

[Gwern Branwen]

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On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Lane Haygood  wrote:
> There's always a chance he was being sarcastic.  That doesn't always come
> across in print well.
>
> -L.

No. He's quite serious about it.

"JJ: That is an interesting perspective on it, I hadn't thought of at
all. My wife had one of her professors that taught in a Moslem country
for a while and said he woke up one day and saw the children had a
bunch of kittens they were throwing up in the air and hitting them
with a baseball bat against the wall and the mothers just sat by and
watched. He said "I am not a Christian, I am an atheist, but I am a
Christian in that I could not tolerate that." There has been an
influence in our society that has made us different from pagans.

GW: We vastly underestimate the importance of Jesus. We think we
don't. We have all these churches and we say how can we be
underestimating Jesus? We don't until we start trying to figure out
what it would be like if he had never lived. When you really start
trying to figure out what it would be like if He never lived you
realize that He is a much more pivotal figure than we give him credit
for. All of these people, everybody at this convention is in that
sense a Christian although most of them would tell you that they are
not and some of them would tell them quite truthfully that they were
Jews who practice Judaism in one of its various forms and so on and so
forth. Nevertheless they have been influenced by Christ much more than
they realized. We are very lucky to have had Him. We are very
fortunate. A friend of mine learned to read Turkish. And he got hold
of a Turkish joke book and read it. And I said, "What were the jokes
like?" He said it was horrible. They were all about ugly tricks that
were being played on blind people and things like that. This is what
we have escaped from and we don't realize that it is there and we came
very close to falling into it. We very easily could have and we still
may."

http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze2tmhh/wolfejbj.html

Yes, that's right folks. Jesus saves [us from being cruel to animals
and the blind].

- --
gwern
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