In one article, I pointed to a person to whom I had said that Zoroastrianism was originally limited to Aryans. He looked up the Z site on the web and told me it started with a loud declaration that all races were welcome.

I observed that that said that they HAD been so limited.

While every religion says it is open to all races, creeds and crocodiles, you do not find the Baptist Church heading up its page declaring that blacks can become Baptists.

Common as it is, this desperate declaration does not LEAD the description of a religion. It is a declaration that is made too early and too earnestly that shows you they are disclaiming a history people know about.

One commenter said that all the churches have this tiring declaration. I agree and I’m sick of it, too. But the whole article was about listening closely, and that depressive declaration showed he was NOT listening closely.

The whole point of the article was not that Z made the declaration, but that it desperately put it up front.

So the point, while I sympathize, showed that the commenter had not paid any attention to the message of the article.

My advice is especially useless if you don’t listen carefully and expand on it by yourself.

The things I think about are usually boiled down to a sentence. For example I get a chuckle out of the fact that every discussion of a growing problem begins with the opinions of experts.

What, exactly, is required to be an expert?

Experience in the field, of course.

So the one sentence: The people consulted to deal with a problem qualify by being the people who made the mistake in the first place.

If you hear that and then go on to dribble along with a comment you wanted to make anyway, you can easily bury that one sentence in a couple of paragraphs.

Which is what almost everybody does with what I work out.

If your only interest is that the expert is a Jew or you want to sell a book-length proof of how he is mistaken, the observation “The people consulted to deal with a problem qualify by being the people who made the mistake in the first place.” will not be of the slightest use for you.

But if you pay attention, that simple statement used correctly, put the person you are debating in a hell of a position.

Not least because HE’S never thought of it.

And if you don’t listen closely, neither will you.