>>>>>>>So you're wrapping yourself in a layer of godlike understanding of your opponents POV .
>>>>>>>I'll stick with the cheap shots.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>BTW I don't think the smug self-identification thing is the preserve of the left. Its human nature
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Sure, but the implication that the only way someone could disagree with you is because they are stupid or somehow morally deficient says more about the accuser than the accused.
>>>>>
>>>>>I never claimed to be example for our young people.
>>>>
>>>><bg> Well, in that we certainly share some self-identification. But at least I hope that if I am wrong (however unlikely <s> ) about anything it is *not* due to stupidity but rather moral deficiency - which I do recognize that in my case always lurks as causation for my behavior.
>>>>
>>>>> Also any disagreement implies some measure if stupidity on the others part. We all see the same facts but for some reason we come to different conclusions.
>>>>
>>>>I wish that were so. Sometimes I think it is a matter of different ideas about ideal outcome, with both quite correct about how to get to the outcome they desire. Sometimes it is because of first-principles from different planets.
>>>>
>>>>I remember in 1995 at a VFP conference listening to a speaker who was definitely known for his brilliance and quick grasp of the new paradigm. At dinner later in a wide ranging discussion I realized he was a graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and then further sat there - as you would say "gob-smacked" - listening to him say he believe the world was 4,986 (or whatever) years old since the day of Creation. (as well as a lot other things that I couldn't believe he was saying with a straight face)
>>>>
>>>>There is another very well-known and (by some) beloved and now deceased member of the Fox community who, allowed to ruminate outside his area of technical brilliance, would share some opinions that would probably scare hell out of you.
>>>>
>>>>Humans are the strangest people I know.
>>>
>>>At university a couple of friends turned out to be creationists like that. Quite a surprise as we where doing geography.
>>>They took me to see a film, The Cross and the Switchblade. I think they hoped for a conversion but perhaps didn't realise I had been brought up as a catholic and there can be no finer inoculation against religion than being taught and occasionally beaten by nuns.
>>
>>My wife always describes herself as a "recovering Catholic". I think the old time ruler wielding nuns are out of fashion here now ( as is being a nun at all, pretty much ) and most Catholic schools have almost entirely lay faculty ( and fear of lawsuits ) but I know in the 50s my friends had stories that sounded like something out of Fox's Book of Martyrs ( which was on my grandmother's coffee table <g> )
>
>Not out of fashion everywhere. The local cult here still has them (and I bet they make those stories sound like liberal tales)..
>
>http://www.smac.edu/

A lot of my best friends as a kid went to Catholic schools. Their school stories were an awakening for me because somehow I had an image of nuns as sweet old ladies. Not hardly. They knocked the snot out of students and if you said anything you got it twice as hard. There did not seem to be any correlation between abstinence and kindness.