In response to another piece called “Joe” below, I gave Joe hell for constantly saying, “I could be wrong.”

I then addressed his point in the next piece. But I apologized for giving him hell for using “I could be wrong” so much.

Joe wondered what I was apologizing for.

But Joe is a tough old warrior. He forgets that Mark just blew his gasket about a humorous article about my big sister I wrote and dcelared he would never have anything to do with me again. Joe doesn’t do that, but I remind him that some people do.

His comment, like all good ones, made me think. Here is waht Joe had to say and my reply:

JOE SAYS:

Well, I’ve read all the pieces and you’ve so far failed to give me hell. You’ll have to work harder at it.

But much more importantly in this therapy session will be your ability to understand what is and what is not an apology. When a man says, “I could be wrong” or “I may be mistaken” with respect to a personal observation, please attempt to understand that this is not an apology. When a man says, “I could be wrong,” what he is doing is allowing the possibility for error to exist. This is the opposite of arrogance. An arrogant man makes a statement that excludes the possibility of his being mistaken. He has arrogated unto himself qualities that he does not possess.

Here’s a tip to know for sure that someone is apologizing to you. He or she says, “I’m sorry for…etc.,” or “please forgive me for…..etc.,” You have never heard anything like this from this writer.

Maybe it’s different where you come from. Where I come from you don’t have to read anything into anything that has been said. As I said to you in an email, Bob, you don’t owe me an apology for anything. I don’t owe you any apology either. I’m straightforward, you’re straightforward, what else is there? As you said in one of your earlier pieces, we tell others about ourselves as we communicate.

I’m also not a diplomat. I know that. I don’t try to be diplomatic. It’s too much like beating around the bush. I don’t even apologize to my wife and she’s my whole world. OK, maybe two or three times in our long marriage. But, you’ll have to agree, that’s not much.

MY REPLY:

I read comments over and over, and here was one I really enjoyed, but it was interspersed
with what I see as apologies.

To put it even more basically, you are telling ME “I could be wrong.”

Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Joe!

My basic doctrine is that our opinion is important, and we are responsible for it. Saying you are wrong is like saying you are not perfect.

And, getting off Joe a minute, that is something I am REALLY sick of!

Many, many times someone at a press conference will go off into the Zoom Zone. Instead of answering the question he has been asked, he will act like the rest of us don’t exist.

He asks himself questions and answers them. The most routine question he asks himself is:

“Is my proposal perfect? No.”

I don’t know about anybody else, but I got over “perfect” about the time I stopped believing in Santa Claus.

If a person took up my time asking himself, “Do I believe in Santa Claus? No.” I would think he had lost what little mind he had.

Nobody else is bothered by this. Nobody else objects to this.

But we are in BOB’S Blog. I am dedicated to making you see your own opinion as THE opinion.

Screw the social scientists. Screw the priests. There is nothing inocent about being like the WEakest Generation and seeing some opinions as requiring your blind obedience.

So when someone gives me their opinion and then says they are being too long-winded or they may be wrong, it is offensive to me.

I am here to get what you think, not your recitation of your possible errors.

In response to “My Humility Can Beat the Hell Out of Your Humility” Shari writes:

“Now days such people don’t outsuffer Christ, they just care more for all the poor people in the world. They are Commies for Christ. ”

Lord, a good comment DOES set my mind on fire!

Please note, Shari, that that “suffering” is seldom done in unpleasant places. They put on a tuxedo and tell an audience at a Hollywood fund-raiser about how awful they feel about third world suffering and how we all need to siffer for it.

A good comment makes my mind go into unexpected places. One of the big deals was called Liberation Theology. Its goal was to meld Christianity with the New World doctrine of Marxism.

All of a sudden, Marxism is the Old World theology.

I was listening to the commentary on an Italian DVD. The interviewer embarrassed the hell out of hte filmmaker. This commentary was bout 1990, and he asked the moviemaker, “How is your movie on Trotsky coming along?”

A litle background. As Sophia Loren once said in a movie, “I’m not supposed to make sense. I’m ITALIAN!”

Before the 1980s the entire European film industry, like European universities, was solidly Communist. But other European movie makers kept it subtle. Subtlety, as Sophia Loren was proud to point out, is not an Italian trait. So when the movie was made I was watching the commentary on, no one in Italian film considered anything important but the Communist Revolution.

So this particular film maker’s great ambition was to prove that the champion of the Only True Faith was not so much Lenin as it was Trotsky. He had planned and dreamed of an epic film about this that would have all the European film-makers gurgling with delight.

Suddenly with the collapse of the Soviet Empire Communism was exposed as not only something that was born senlie, but silly and evil.

Poor baby! Just a few years before this guy had been in the middle of whole culture of people who assumed that Communism was the Way of the Future. He did NOT appreciate being reminded of that.

So Liberation Theology has gone from synthesizing Modern Thought, i.e, Marxism, with Old Thought, i.e., Christianity to desperately trying to find another peg to hang its ideas on.

EXACTLY the same thing happened in the case of Zoroastrianism. Fot the first SEVEN CENTURIES of its existence, Christian theologians tried to synthesiz their faith with that of their world’ most powerful religion, one that had been the official religion of Persia since long before Xerxes invaded Greece.

The it just plain disappeared. Iran was conquered by Islam. Zoroastrian literature was burned.

All the Christian theologians instantly forgot the centuries they had tried to synthesize their faith with the other Great Faith. But the synthesis kept reappearing in the form of Manichaeism.

Manichaeism and Marxism are, when you cut the crap and get down to cases, amazingly similar. Both say they are all for Goodness over Badness, but their mutual idea of Goodness is self-hatred and genetic suicide.

Guilt and self-hatred are what both Manichaeism and Western Communism are all about. Early Christianity preached sterility. In fact, the more you had to offer, themore beautiful you were and the more intelligent you were, the more blessed it was for you to lock yourself up in lifelong chastity.

Many early Christian stories expressed this ideal. A beautiful, intelligent and, yes, blond woman would marry her ideal man, handsome, healthy, virtuous and smart.

The, on the wedding night, she would persuade her husband that they should live in mutual chastity. This was St. Paul’s ideal. This was the early Christian ideal when they were melding with the later Zoroastrian hatred of all things of This World.

So when Marxist self-hatred keeps surfacing in the name of Christ, we should not be surprised.

Which is why I write about genetic morality. In Marxism and in trditional Christianity there is no such thing. Their only genetic morality is self-hatred.