Jimbo tells me repeatedly, and probably correctly, that my ignorant comments on theology make me look foolish. He is kind enough to say that my comments on other matters are often brilliant, but my ignorant ramblings on theology undermine my authority.

Jimbo is worried because he thinks the points I do make on matters I know about are important. He does not want people to lose faith in them because I make stupid remarks in other areas. I appreciate his concern.

But the blog is precisely where my little clique gathers. This is the place I CAN make a clown of myself.

When I opened the Comments section of the blog, I dropped some responsibility on YOUR shoulders.

In the blog, my ignorance is as important as my knowledge. My ignorance is the ignorance of a lot of people. I don’t say anything that has not occurred to others. If I say things that need correcting, it is up to YOU to correct me.

When this blog started, I put this in caps:
DO NOT HOLD ME RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING I SAY IN MY BLOG.

Let me repeat that, since my putting this in shouting all-caps doesn’t seem to have sunk in:
DO NOT HOLD ME RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING I SAY IN MY BLOG.

The blog is not a class. The blog is a seminar. This is an old man meandering through his thoughts. You can learn from that. An intelligent person can get a lot out of what I say. But what you get out of it is up to you.

But this is where I learn, too.

I want to have a place where I can make a fool of myself.

This is what us Southerners call “porch talk.”

When I was in college, many people would say, “I got my real education in the bull sessions.”

This is the bull session.

This is the porch talk.

A man who thinks he knows everything will never learn anything. All my life I have found that the most important things I learned I discovered by making a fool of myself.

It is amazing. You can sit down with an Authority on any subject and ask respectful, diplomatically-worded questions and he will give you carefully worded almost-replies. You won’t learn a thing from him that he has not already written for publication.

But if you make a flat statement that hits his sore point, he will dump everything he knows on you. He will get back to basics. He considers you a fool, and he wants to prove it.

Many an Authority HAS made a fool of me.

But I don’t mind at all. I am not worried about how I look. I am listening carefully to the basics he is talking about that he would NEVER have gotten into if I had been respectful.

My strategy is to make it perfectly clear that he is dealing with an over-educated redneck from Pontiac, South Carolina. And when I make the flat statement that infuriates him, he realizes I am not just being modest.

He goes ballistic, and he tells me what I want to know.

I call this moral courage.

If you are afraid of being made a fool of by The Great Man, then you will get nothing out of talking to The Great Man. You should stop talking to him personally and just read what he wrote.

None of the Great Men I ever talked to ever got bored. They either really can’t give me the basic answers I wanted or they go away feeling satisfied that they showed that moron what a fool he was.

Meanwhile, said moron has gotten exactly what he wanted.

Unlike the Great Man, I know that I will always be a fool. But I hope to be the fool you need.

I want to be a good fool.

I want to be God’s Fool.

A little child thinks that since he can’t see you when he closes his eyes that means you can’t see him. That game is called peek-a-boo.

We were all raised with “don’ts.” We learned that morality consists of NOT doing things. So if we DON’T do things, we are guiltless.

Our legal system has gone nuts about this.

“I would rather let a hundred guilty men go than convict one innocent man.” All my life that was the motto of American justice.

Only lately have we begun to realize that if you let ninety-nine guilty men back out on the street, you will kill more than one inocent person.

You voted not to convict because you did not want to “play God.” If you give the defendant the benefit of the doubt, you did not give some innocent person whom that person will kill the benefit of the doubt.

You have played God.

When you say, “I would rather let ninety-nine guilty people go than convict one innocent person,” you are really saying, “I would rather let ninety-nine people I CAN SEE go than to convict one innocent person I CAN SEE.”

The reason? You can’t SEE the people those ninety-nine felons will kill.

That game is called peek-a-boo.

When you decide against stem cell research, you are not innocent. Embryonic stem stem cell research may be useless. But you can SEE the stem cell you destroy. If you don’t destroy it, it will either 1) die on its own or 2) not be created at all.

So, if You don’t do it, you are not responsible for the results, right?

Wrong.

The power comes with the territory.

As I have pointed out in WhitakerOnline, the Oriental version of the Golden Rule is totally different from ours. The Oriental version says, “Do NOT do unto others what you would NOT have them do unto you.”

My Golden Rule says, “DO unto others as you WOULD have them do unto you.”

My Golden Rule makes me fully responsible for all the power I have. This is what frustrates and infuriates many people about my refusal to simply condemn stem cell research and forget it. This is what frustrates and infuriates people about my refusal to simply condemn capital punishment.

“Bob,” they say, “just let it go.”

But I repeat what Martin Luther said, “Here I stand. I can do nothing else.”

Science is forcing power on us.

I, for myself, cannot play peek-a-boo with it.

Here I stand. I can do nothing else.