> You can take your "morally harmful" and shove it right up your butt.

Heh. Dave has the gift of cutting right through all the BS and getting everything out there on the table. And I'm getting tired of trying to hit the "eminently reasonable" tone, anyway. So let's have at it.

> *I* will decide for myself what *I* consider right or wrong for me to read. I will never ever ever let YOU or ANYONE ELSE decide that *for* me. If it was written and got published, I will be the one to decide whether or not I will read it. Nobody else.
>

Blah blah blah blah blah, yay you. *Sigh* I'm in the mood to flame a bit, so it's almost too bad I know better than to treat you as a blithe idiot who doesn't believe he has anything to learn from anyone. That would be attacking a straw Dave, not the real article. So lemme try formulating a serious answer.

I wouldn't feel obliged to obey a law that I believed to be wrong, either. So what's my problem with this rant? I guess it's this: I wouldn't submit to wrongful coercion because I'm answerable to a higher authority -- it's the old dilemma of the apostles in Acts: "we must obey God rather than men." On the other hand, *your* grounds for disregarding certain social rules appear to be that you are answerable to *no* authority higher than yourself. This is an impasse. If we don't agree on the matter of dependence on authority, we can't really get anywhere in a debate.

I never did respond to this earlier Dave post, although I wanted to:

"But I don't want God to have a plan for my life. I want my own will to do what I want, whether that be in the service of God or otherwise.

I would only accept a God that *asked* me to follow his plan, and left the decision entirely up to me. Furthermore, any God who would punish me for *not* following his plan and instead deciding my own fate wouldn't be much worth to me anyway. If my manager at work "asks" me to do something and then punishes me for not doing it, then he was never really asking in the first place--he was commanding, and I ticked him off by saying no. I find that vindictive and petty--two things I don't want in any God I might choose to worship."

This is the source of the preponderance of aggravation that I endure. You, and an easy majority of the rest of Americans out there, want God the Boot-Licker, or God the Glad Hand. Or, possibly, God the Salad Bar Item.

What do *I* want, then? I too have a selfish streak and don't treat God as God the way I should; I often bristle at having to obey commands handed down from on high. I can really only say at best that "I want to want" God to be God and not my personal slave. I don't yet earnestly and fully want God to be God over me. But God is who he is, so I'm going to have to abandon what I want.

I have to trust that if anyone believes that God is God, he won't need me to help him to the same conclusion. If a person doesn't recognize God as God, then he doesn't need me to argue the conclusion, either. There's no intelligent or profitable argument I can give; I guess I'm ranting to myself after all.

Lastly, however, I must get this off my chest: if *I* were God, had existed for all time, had created all things and all people in my own wisdom and by my own design, had come into the world in a human body to be put to death to save these people that I regarded as my own children, -- if I were this God and had done all these things, and heard everywhere the self-assured blather of fools demanding that I act as their fawning sycophant?

I would sear the flesh right off their bones in a trice.

Iss "angrier than usual" achar