Pop Quiz (to Farrell and back to David Court)

Joseph Crea Joseph.Crea@worldnet.att.net
Thu, 19 Feb 1998 04:13:12 +0000 (00887883192, 19980219041311.AAA4952@LOCALNAME) 

Hello, Dave!

At 10:14 PM 2/17/98 -0500, David Court wrote:


>(DAVE 2/17)  Farrell:  Ok.  Please answer with ONLY "true" or "false" (as I 

>have been asked to do above).


--snip--


>4.   I, Farrell Till, after having shown in my life that I can turn my back 

>on what I am CONVICTED about and know to be true, acknowledge that my 

>conviction in my current "beliefs" may also be completely wrong and I have 

>the capacity to turn my back on it as well - in other words, I have shown 

>that I can preach, write about and teach what I know in my heart to not be

>true.



      Tell me, please, by what possible criteria would it have been possible
for Farrell (or anyone else) to, concerning the essential tenets of
Christianity, KNOW them TO BE TRUE?  Perhaps, as you so quaintly put it, by
CONVICTION?  If CONVICTION is the hallmark of truth, then what are we to
make of those people who maintain that they KNOW, absolutely KNOW beyond any
shadow of a doubt, that something is true, when in fact it is demonstrably
false?  Are they to be condemned, as you are here condemning Mr. Till, as
being guilty of duplicity and/or conscious fraud?  

    Do you by any chance recall the furor over (and the media attention
given to) the kidnapping, sexual molestation and murder of young Polly Klass
a couple of years ago?  About a week into the situation, her mother was
interviewed by one of the network news-shows and she stated that she KNEW --
she JUST KNEW beyond any possibility of uncertainty, that her daughter was
alive.  This woman was, in your terminology, CONVICTED concerning whether
her daughter was dead or alive.  Unfortunately, as events later revealed,
Polly Klass had been dead for several days when her mother made this
statement.  As this example painfully illustrates, it is indeed possible to
have a conviction concerning something and still be wrong.  Despite the
pathos of this, it would have been far more heart-wrenching if Mrs. Klass
had continued to hold on to that false conviction in the face of facts to
the contrary.

   If we were to turn to your own situation, I suspect that we would
discover that you were (at the appropriate age) convicted of the existence
of Santa Claus or the Easter bunny or maybe even the Tooth Fairy.  And that
your subsequent disavowal of these beliefs are conclusive evidence of your
lack of integrity and honour, since you are now able to assert, contrary to
what you knew in your heart to be true, that they do not and never did exist
except as delusions and fantasies.  In the future have a care, since
(according to the tenets of curious, though wide-spread cult) the standards
by which one judges others will be the standards by which oneself is judged. 


With Mettaa,

Joseph Crea
<Joseph.Crea@worldnet.att.net>