I'm Right!

Ministerial Meandering

I’m right!

It has been said - with some justification - that there is nothing more dangerous than certainty.  Indeed, it has been suggested that there is no greater sin.  I’m not sure I would go that far, but I am certain (!) that certainty can be very dangerous.

I am going to mention people in the news south of our border just once more this week, and then try to avoid them as much as possible - unless, by some small and unlikely chance, something positive were to come forth from there.

Charlie Kirk was an opinionated young man.  Of that there can be little doubt.  He liked to call himself a ‘debater’, but he rarely actually listened to what was being said to him - because he already had the answer, and it was usually the diametric opposite of what was being suggested to him.  I have seen many of his televised ‘debates’, in both the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, and elsewhere in the USA, where he would attempt to brow-beat his opponent into submission with a ‘This is so, isn’t it - yes or no?’  If his debater tried to nuance the question, he would simply get louder and louder with his insistence of “Yes or no?”

On some topics his points were valid, but the manner in which he made them was consistently aggressive - he, Charlie Kirk - was right, and the rest of the world was wrong.  I was sad for him, because his good points could have been made so much better with a gentler approach.  

I was thinking how exhausting it must be to wake up every morning and think that you’ve got to spend the day telling people how wrong they are, and how you’re right.  I wondered if he ever had any room for doubt or deeper consideration for his topics.  At thirty, it is difficult to be sufficiently mature to know all things.  Most of us, as we mature, begin to realize that the older we get and the more we learn, the more we realize that we don’t know.  

Even Jesus had his moments of doubt in Gethsemane.  He was also about thirty - but he never brow-beat anyone.

Philip+