3. Avoid sarcasm.
Sarcasm is the use of sharp, cutting remarks or language intended to mock, wound, or subject to contempt or ridicule.
Some call it being snotty, nasty, or a real jerk. Whatever you call it, the general idea is, don’t.
June 10, 2009 by molleth
3. Avoid sarcasm.
Sarcasm is the use of sharp, cutting remarks or language intended to mock, wound, or subject to contempt or ridicule.
Some call it being snotty, nasty, or a real jerk. Whatever you call it, the general idea is, don’t.
When I was a non-egal (since that was what I had been taught) I had an incredulous response to egal claims at first. When something seems preposterous, it is very easy to sound like sarcasm (or even be sarcasm) when discussing it, as it seems so far from even being a remote possibility, after all, how could all those teachers I respected have gotten this subject so (possibly) wrong?
It’s hard to realize the same teachers who blessed us so much good teaching, might have made some mistakes along the way.
I recently read the following in:
Baffled to Fight Better
Job and the Problem of Suffering
Chambers, O. (1996, c1931). Baffled to fight better: Talks on the Book of Job. (5th ed.). London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott [for the] Oswald Chambers Publications Association.
Then answered Eliphaz the Temanite and said, Should a wise man suffer vain knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind? Should he reason with unprofitable talk? or with speeches wherewith he can do no good? (Job 15:1-3).
A temporising mind is one that takes its position from immediate circumstances and never alters that position. Eliphaz says that Job is simply bombastic; he sees in Job what he is himself. The weapon of a temporising mind is sarcasm. There is a difference between sarcasm and irony (cf. Job 12:1-3). Sarcasm is the weapon of the weak man; the word literally means to tear flesh from the bone. Both Isaiah and the apostle Paul make free use of irony, but they never use sarcasm. If a weak man is presented with facts he cannot understand, he invariably turns to sarcasm.
Eliphaz addresses a “man of straw,” but all the time he purports to be talking to Job. First, he takes the scolding turn—“All you say about the suffering you are going through is much ado about nothing.” Scolding is characteristic of the mind which is in a corner and does not see the way out; it falls back therefore to its own entrenched position. No one damns like an theologian, nor is any quarrel so bitter as a religious quarrel. If God can be summed up in a phrase—and Eliphaz and every man with a creed holds that He can be—then there is the ban of finality* about the view: “What I say is God”; and this is the essential nature of religious tyranny. Up to the time of the war, God, to many a man, was merely his own theological statement of Him; but now his religious forms of belief have been swept away and for a while he says—“I have lost my faith in God.” What has happened is that though he has lost his faith in his statement of God, he is on the way to finding God Himself. Never be afraid if your circumstances dispute what you have been taught about God; be willing to examine what you have been taught, and never take the conception of an theologian as infallible; it is simply an attempt to state things.
*(ban of finality: the limitation or “curse” of having one’s mind made up, unwilling to consider new information)
Blessings,
Ralph
Thank you for sharing, Ralph. Insightful!