The Game said:
My reading comprehension skills are not in question, unlike your judgement and inferential reasoning skills. I found your remarks about “prayer” and “God” in poor taste and especially your perversion of the Lord’s Prayer (see below). Do not miscast me in the role of some religious zealot because I am most certainly not but I am also not going to allow your comments to pass without comment. Lastly, your psychoanalysis of Tim Tebow is unfair, unjust and mean-spirited.
You have completely avoided providing any justification for the false statements in your first post. Instead you have now raised new objections apparently abandoning your old one. At least you appear to have read this thread for the first time, and gotten yourself vaguely on topic. Your comprehension of this thread and what is written in it, however, are still poor.
I do infer with my limited "inferential reasoning" powers, however, that what appeared to be a comprehension problem in your first post was more likely just a complete failure to read the thread before coming in here trash talking. I guess you thought such behavior would reflect well on the people you claimed to represent. You owe everyone an apology.
Only two people in this thread felt the necessity to deny being religious zealots. One of them is you. Both of you made your denials immediately before or after acting exactly like a religious zealot, and most likely because both of you recognized yourselves as zealots and feared others would too. If you are not a zealot, and not acting like one, then why would you think anybody might believe that you are one? If you are not a religious zealot, you certainly were doing a wonderful imitation of one in your first post.
You came charging in here waving your sword of righteousness as if on a jihad, and declaring how "insulted" and "offended" you were on behalf of all Christianity for an imagined slight, all without examination of the actual words to which you were supposedly objecting. If that does not define the term "religious zealot," then I don't know what does.
Making accusations that you either know to be false, or without any knowledge of whether they are true, is called "bearing false witness." Maybe you've heard of it. “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor” is the 9th of God's Commandments, and it is the 4th negative precept in the company of murder, adultery, and theft.
Having borne false witness, and worse, having done so in the name of Christianity, you still have not shown sufficient repentance to apologize for your actions. Instead, once the truth of your false accusation was challenged, you simply changed the subject.
I see that now that you have actually read the thread, I have progressed from having insulted, offended and disparaged all of Christendom to merely being accused of exercising "poor taste." That’s quite a difference. That you have changed your rhetoric indicates that there may be some hope that you are reasonable, and therefore I will take the time to explain to you in clear, literal detail my position that you should have been able to infer from my various statements and their context.
Let me start by saying that your statement about bad taste appears to stem from your feeling that the linking of football or gambling with prayer and God in my statements is in bad taste. That is exactly the reason that the some of the statements and the changes to Psalm 23 were made. That is the reaction you are supposed to have. The statements and allegory were meant to demonstrate the bad taste involved in Tim Tebow constantly praying on a football field.
It is your inability to engage in anything but literal reading that has caused you to be unable to infer my position from the statements you quoted. You do not seem to be able to recognize or distinguish from their context statements said in jest, mocking statements, sarcasm, illustration, use of exaggeration to make a point in debate, parody, allegory or parable. Strangely it is not just your inability to draw inferences that is the problem. At various points my position was stated clearly and directly. You appear to have either missed all of those statements in your reading, or to have failed to understand even clear statements in your zeal to be insulted.
The statements you point to were all made to demonstrate my point that that prayer and God are inappropriate when injected into certain types of activities. If you think joining football and prayer and God is all fine, then you should not have any objection to my citing Tim Tebow's actual record, and then stating that it would be worse if God hadn't helped him. The point is that by linking his prayers to his performance, Tebow allows his lousy record to reflect upon the effectiveness of prayer.
If, on the other hand, you think joining activities like football or gambling with prayer is in bad taste, as it appears you may, then we agree. In that case, you should have no objection to my illustrations of the inappropriateness of joining prayer with those activities.
Since you have been unable to infer my opinions from my statements, here they are in easy literal terms:
1. I believe that Judeo-Christian prayer is inappropriate as a public display immediately prior to, after, or during sporting events and other forms of entertainment, unless there is clearly some specific non-sports reason for the prayer eg. --kneeling to pray over a fallen player.
2. The implication when one kneels to pray as a ritual before every football game, or after every successful play, or after every win, is that God and the religion approve of the activity, aided in the activity, and even took sides in the activity. You were offended by my statement that if God helped Tebow to his 46% record, then imagine how bad he would be without God’s help. The point is that Tebow should not be raising the implication that his performance in a football game and prayer are tied together. To so so makes prayer appear ineffective when Tebow performs badly. Tim Tebow combining prayer with a a trivial activity like a football game is, in my mind, the equivalent of taking God's name in vain.
3. It is my opinion that prayer before activities that might be disapproved by the religion is particularly egregious. It gives the possibly wrong impression that the religion approves of and that God will even aid in the possibly disapproved activity. For a an illustration that will be less emotionally fraught for you than the ones I used previously imagine a Hindu waiting until the TV cameras are on him to say Hindu prayers prior to participating in The Annual Beef Hot Dog Eating Contest. His public demonstration of prayer before doing something upon which his religion frowns insults Hindu beliefs and insults the pious among Hindus. Does my statement about insulting the pious sound familiar to you? You inexplicably cited it as one of my "bad taste" statements about prayer (speak of poor comprehension).
4. Christ's teachings were clearly against all forms of violent behavior. Whether or not we strictly adhere to those teachings in the sports and entertainment we enjoy, the public display of prayer before a game that practices and glorifies gratuitous violence is no more appropriate than Hindu prayers before a Hot Dog Eating Contest, or a gambler waiting until he is in the middle of the Hilton Sports Book to engage in public prayer for the purpose of gaining fame. Whether or not Tebow's prayers are actually about the football game, the implication is that they are.
5. It is my opinion that prayers before a sporting event are an egotistical display that trivializes God. It implies that God cares about the game, and will not only aid in the better performance of man against man violence in the game, but will take sides and help Denver. There is little that could be more egotistical. It places the trivial matter of a football game and the athlete’s performance in that game on a par with hunger, curing of the sick and dying, and similar matters. I don't believe that any religion should be publicly trivialized.
6. It is my opinion that every pro athlete knows that everything out of the ordinary that is done on the field of a packed stadium will be reported by the media. Tebow has brought kneeling to pray to a level that has distinguished him from every other athlete that may do the same thing, and that has made his name synonymous with kneeling down to pray. Tebow is not unaware of it. His praying is not in spontaneous response to any sudden event. Like every celebrity, Tebow knows that he is getting huge publicity from praying on the field and by answering questions like the one about his virginity. As a result of that publicity, Tebow is getting very lucrative endorsement offers that most athletes with a similarly mediocre record would not get. Every time Tim Tebow waits until the stadium is full to kneel down, rather than praying in the locker room, or in the shadow of the passageway to the field, he knows that his action will increase the value of his stock. Celebrities are fully aware that if they don't want something reported they must do it privately. If they wait to do it in front of a packed stadium, they are seeking the publicity they know they will get. It is my belief that using prayer, God and religion to gain fame and fortune is in bad taste. (See my handicapper praying in Macy's window allegory of which Psalm 23 was a part, and the point of which seems to have flown about 42 feet above your head.)
Since you cite Psalm 23 specially, I will address it further. The 23rd Psalm is a poem written by a Jew, King David, as an expression of his personal love of God. May I presume that your objection to my having changed the words does not stem from some misplaced belief that my changing of the words disparages Judaism and every Jew since Abraham first spoke to God? No doubt the reason you think the change is a “perversion” is that the change combines words of devotion with a prayer for success in an activity in which public references to religion are inappropriate. A prayer before a football game saying, “May the Lord Jesus Christ bless this game of violence and aid me to perform well in it,” is no different. I could change the words of the 23rd Psalm to reference football and you would think it equally in bad taste I suspect. The purpose of my allegory was to demonstrate that using prayer to gain fame and saying words of devotion before an activity that the religion frowns upon is a perversion of prayer. I also intended to mock the poster to whom I was replying. I doubt that anybody, except you, read the prior post to which I replied, and read the allegory, and concluded that I was demonstrating what should be done rather than what should not be done. .
My positions don't insult prayer or God, and the “bad taste” was the point of some of them. The statements illustrate positions in defense of prayer and God. Let me say again, your understanding of this thread is so far off base that you are barely in the ballpark. But, at least you are no longer all the way over in the next county anymore.
I cannot make my position any clearer. If you still don't understand, you will need to go right ahead and continue your belief that my comments are in "bad taste." Taste is an individual thing. I, for instance, think it is in bad taste to falsely accuse people before reading the written words that are the basis for the accusation--not that zealots don't do it all the time.
Keep in mind that I assume you didn't read the thread before your first post because, as a charitable person, I am giving you the benefit of the doubt. If you did carefully read the thread before posting the first time, then your first accusation was intentionally false. In my mind that would be much worse than bad taste.
If you wish to continue to argue by taking statements out of their context and pretending they were meant literally when it should be clear they were not, I would suggest you might find more success at your local school board arguing that the schools should teach the Story of Jonah in Marine Biology class as an equally valid theory of whale behavior. That should help your children succeed if they choose the field of oceanography as their career later in life. The education of your children is a more important issue then Tim Tebow anyway. Isn’t it?
By the way, I still haven’t heard you apologize for your commandment-breaking first post..