You are a fringe person. So am I. We think about social cause and effect in ways not suspected by the general public.
This presents a problem. We are on email lists of suppliers of fringe information.
There are lots of groups out there that are even fringier than we are. They want us to join them.
CHRISTIAN CLASSICAL EDUCATION
I was sent an email by a fundamentalist lady on the terrible evils of the Christian classical curriculum.
I have been writing about this for over 20 years.
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She is coming late to the party.
She posted her critique on her website, where she blames the evils of the Christian classical curriculum on my brand of theology.
Why would she send her tirade to me? To say that she is out of touch with reality is not an exaggeration, as you will see.
I wrote back:
Send me the following:1. A link to the curriculum you recommend
2. A link to the school that uses it
I knew what the answer would be. I got it within the hour.
Hello Gary.I don't promote a curriculum. These are my thoughts based on Scripture.
Grace and peace,
Not much grace. Even less peace.
FIRST, CHECK WITH ALEXA.COM
Next, I checked her website on Alexa. Ranking: 18,342,487. Rarely do I see any ranking this low.
Any site ranked lower than 1,000,000 is seen by no one. It's OK if the site is a business card site for getting a job. For a public opinion site, it's futile.
She has strong opinions. C. S. Lewis was not a true Christian. Rick Warren, author of the largest-selling evangelical book of the 21st century, is a communist. And so on. She speaks with absolute authority.
When you shout in an empty room, you shout with authority, and no one answers back.
I decided to answer back.
Almost nobody has ever heard of her. I searched. There is a Facebook entry and a few references to her site.
I do not get it. I never have. Why do people post their opinions endlessly on sites that no one reads? They could be helping the poor, teaching kids how to read, running a home business, or working on some project that has either a market or a need.
This woman is a lawyer. She has JD after her name. Yet I found no record of her law office. She could do pro bono work for poor victims. But no. Ranting is what she does. Ranting for Jesus in an empty room.
Every movement has these people. They are harmless. No one notices. But when a wanna-be reformer thinks that she is accomplishing something positive by shouting at the top of her lungs in an empty room, and does this for 10 years, I wonder about her sanity. She is connected to reality by little more than a thread.
FUTILITY AS A LIFESTYLE
Fringe critics look around them, and see that everything is all wrong.
They curse the endless darkness in an always-empty room.
These people spend their lives fighting something with nothing.
When you find such people, avoid them. Even when they make plausible points, they offer no program to replace what is wrong with what is right.
They do not expect positive change. They devote no time to developing even one positive reform to implement.
They expect God to reward them in eternity because they spend their lives shouting in their empty rooms.
This mentality is one of futility. They invite the world into their empty rooms to listen to their endless tirades.
Decline the invitation.
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