I don’t recall a single one of us saying
“the incest-prone mother did it!”
So much for honesty and accuracy in posting.
Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls; dogs and cats . . . Today’s lesson will be about EITHER/OR and BOTH/AND
1. Many folks with a desperate obsessive/compulsive need to bring greatly increased, often rigid and narrow but also usually vain attempts at order to their lives . . . often out of a chaotic ATTACHMENT DISORDERED childhood of their own the first 8 years of their lives . . .
2. tend to have an addictive, compulsive attachment to EITHER/OR explanations for life and life’s events. All manner of very complex events and experiences with many shadings of meaning and many gradients of cause and effect are shoe-horned into a tiny black box OR a tiny white box.
3. That enables such folks to feel slightly safer, more secure, more smug, more lofty and erudite . . . for a few minutes anyway—before they rush to find another
4. BLAZINGLY, BRAZENLY INACCURATE EITHER/OR to try and vainly attempt to squeeze reality into.
OTHER FOLKS, thankfully . . .
5. Realize that in Scripture as well as in life . . . God has constructed things with such complexity that He often slices straight catty wumpus across such simplistic interpretations of life and makes clear that a given situation or issue or set of issues and factors is a case of BOTH/AND much more than it is a case of EITHER/OR.
6. One example of this is when the pharisees asked Jesus whether an ill man’s sins had caused the illness OR his parents’ sins. JESUS SLICED THROUGH such EITHER/OR explanations.
The King of Straw Dog Oversimplifications is accusing those who disagree with him of posting oversimplified Straw Dog arguments.