John the Baptist sprinkled Jesus with water, because that was how priests were officially ordained?

I feel like I forgot a few things, but here is what I wrote up about this past Sunday’s sermon at the Presbyterian Church we’ve been attending:


The sermon was on Matt. 3:13-15, and I thought it might be on how that John originally demurred to baptize Jesus because of humility and then acceded, but the Presbyterian elder instead claimed that it showed that Jesus was sprinkled.


The crux of his argument was that Jesus was a priest, and thus had to have an ordination, and the OT (he cited Num. 8) said that the priests were sprinkled, so for Jesus to be a priest and for the Jews to have accepted Him as such, He would necessarily have to have been likewise sprinkled, so even if Matt. 3 was an immersion, Jesus would have had to have been sprinkled elsewhere.


There are so many problems with this that I scarcely know where to start. So, in no particular order (though some build on others)…


1) Numbers 8 does indeed mention sprinkling, but not for priests. Instead, the people being sprinkled are the Levites. The priests (and particularly the high priests) are consecrated and ordained elsewhere. Indeed, the word “priest” doesn’t even appear in this chapter. V19 shows that these Levites weren’t full priests like Aaron and his descendants, because they were provided to Aaron and his sons as workers and helpers for them.

2) Further, while the Levites were indeed sprinkled, that wasn’t the fullness of the ordination; they also had to shave their whole bodies and wash their clothes, and offer two bullocks (one of which was for a sin offering!!) Why would the preacher pull out just the requirement for sprinkling from this chapter, and ignore the other parts?

3) Also, if Jesus’s baptism by John was an ordination into the priesthood, wouldn’t that mean that all the other people John baptized were also being ordained as priests? If not, why not?

4) Not to mention the tiny, little, insignificant detail that they had to be descendants of Levi!!! Jesus wasn’t, so even if He had done all of the other things, the Jews still wouldn’t have accepted Him as a priest, since He failed the first criterion: being of the tribe of Levi.

5) Indeed, the author of Hebrews specifically talks about this in ch. 7, by saying that Jesus was not a priest after the order of Levi:

*A) He is said to have the priesthood “after the order of Melchizedek” and not “after the order of Aaron” (7:11)

*B) He is “without descent”, meaning He didn’t have the official proof of being a Levite or otherwise genealogically worthy of the priesthood

*C) His priesthood is greater than that of Levi

*D) Perfection doesn’t come by the Levitical priesthood

*E) V12 says “the priesthood being changed”

*F) V16 says Jesus was made a priest “not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life”

*G) V20-22 point out another difference between Jesus and Levitical priests – that the latter had no oath, but God swore an oath to the one who is “a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek”

*H) Jesus is the surety (and I would say “priest”) of “a better testament”, and thus doesn’t need to undergo the same process of consecration that Levitical priests or Levites had to.

6) Back to the OT, Exodus 29 gives the process for the high priest – and Jesus is most certainly a High Priest! – and this is most unlike anything that happened at Jesus’s baptism. The closest a Presbyterian could say would be that v21 says that some of the blood was sprinkled on Aaron, like (they believe) John the Baptist sprinkled water on Jesus. But blood is not water, and nothing else in the chapter happened at Jesus’s baptism – no sacrifices (including a sin offering), no dressing in priestly garments, no putting special headgear on, no anointing oil, no putting blood followed by oil on the ear, thumb, and foot, and no eating of the sacrificial ram.

7) There was one other part of the consecration process in Exod. 29 that I didn’t include: v4 says that Aaron and his sons (the high priest and the other priests) are to be brought to the entrance of the tabernacle, and there Moses is to “wash them with water”. This may not be a full immersion, but it is a full cleansing, and as such is closer to immersion than it is to having a few drops of water being sprinkled on your head!

8) While I do think that the Greek word translated “baptize” (in its various forms, including “baptism”) generally means to “immerse”, I have heard an argument that it can’t always mean “immerse” because some part of the Greek translation of the OT (the Septuagint, or LXX) uses the term when speaking of washing or cleaning something like a table, that wouldn’t (or couldn’t) be immersed due to its size. Even if we grant this use other than “full immersion”, it still would indicate that the thing being “baptized” was thoroughly cleaned, not that a few drops of water were sprinkled on it.

9) Also, if Jesus needed only to be sprinkled with a few drops of water, why does the next verse after the passage cited say that Jesus came up out of the water? If only a few drops were needed, why didn’t John have a bucket and go around to the people and splash a bit of water on them?

10) All that said, remember that Jesus was not said to be a Levitical priest or Levite, but a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. How was Melchizedek ordained as a priest? We are given no ceremonial rites like we are given of the priests and Levites. While I think the most orthodox and Biblical answer is simply, “God made him a priest” (with an oath, which Heb. 7:21 says), since the Presbyterian minister had no problem with invoking Leviticus in order to try to find parallels between Jesus’s baptism and how Levites were installed, why can we not do the reverse? — and say that even though it isn’t mentioned, Melchizedek must have been consecrated as a priest by immersion, since Jesus needed John to immerse Him!

Child, Adolescent, Adult

I saw this post on Instagram, and liked it, and wanted to remember it.

No, this is just being an adult

While browsing on F*Book, I happened to see the following meme:

I’ll admit that I know only a bit about so-called “shadow work”. I think it sounds worse (to Christians) than it probably should. When I first heard it, I thought of it as a sort of shadowy thing, “inviting demons into your life” or something like that, but after learning more about it, it sounds more innocuous than that. Basically, it is working on negative emotions and past experiences, so you feel better. Or something like that. [Feel free to tell me where I’m wrong because, as I said, I have read only a bit about it.]

As I read each point of the meme, I was like…

Phil Conners listening to Rita’s description of her ideal man

Sure, I’m not perfect, and some people might think I’m being rude, and it’s possible I’m actually passive-aggressive when I intend to be assertive, but I think I’m pretty balanced.

Here’s the thing, though — I haven’t done any “shadow work”, and I consider that list to be simply the way adults ought to be and behave, if they want to be considered mature. A failure in this is a sign of immaturity. Now, it’s possible that doing “shadow work”, and trying to get to the bottom of root issues may be a way to mature, but the way the meme phrases it, it’s almost like it’s saying that all people will be, well, immature unless they’ve deliberately done “shadow work”. Nope; some people are just mature. I wish more were.

A positive case for YEC

“YEC” = “Young Earth Creationism”; this is from a discussion on Reddit, in which I took exception to someone claiming that evolution disproved the Bible (they were ex-Mormons, so they had even more objections to Mormonism, but of course, I would tend to agree with those objection). At the current time, I haven’t seen any response, though I did see that somebody had downvoted the comments.

Without further ado, here it is:

Since I talked about a positive case, perhaps I shouldn’t start with a negative, but I think it’s a major issue that most people haven’t even recognized, so here goes. When reading most things that are written in support of evolution, they sound good at first, but if you really read them and dig into them, you’ll realize that they sound like an evolutionist version of FairMormon. Next time you read something in support of evolution, just pay attention to how many times they’ll sound so sure, but will slip in words like “perhaps” or “maybe” or “suppose”. That exercise can be illuminating on its own. Following their explanations and claims (for instance, they find a few skull fragments and draw entire animals — then often they later have to retract their claims about their appendages once they find more complete remains) can likewise be illuminating, provided you clearly discern the difference between data and conclusions, and between facts and inferences.

For instance, if you test a rock for the presence of some substances, the results of the test will be facts (e.g., it had X amount of this or that chemical), but the conclusions presented are not facts (e.g., “therefore this rock is 20,000,000 years old”) but are inferences based on suppositions and assumptions. Thus, the conclusions are only as good and true as the assumptions, and if you change the assumptions, the conclusions will necessarily change. [This is not unlike the math equation 2x+1=y, so that if x=0, y=1, but if x=100 y=201. Here is a modern-day Parable of the Candle which demonstrates the same.]

Now for the positive case:

Assuming that the Bible is true, that means that just a few thousand years ago, there was a flood that covered the entire earth with water and all creatures died (except those on the Ark, which includes 8 people and representative land animals). Logically, one would expect massive amounts of sedimentation all over the earth, including massive layers stretching over large portions of continents — and this is exactly what we see. Further, we would expect to find billions of dead things buried in these sedimentary layers, and again, we find that as well.

We would further expect to find that all humans are closely related, and that is also what we find. Evolutionists explain this fact by claiming that the entire population of humans hovered somewhere around 10k-50k for thousands of years, before splitting up for some unknown reason, and spreading out over the earth. However, that is just one of many stories that can account for the data. Another story that can account for the data is the Creation-Flood-Babel narrative of the Bible. [If you want to dig deep, you can read articles here, most if not all of them written by a qualified geneticist with a legitimate Ph.D.]

When I look at the explanations given by evolutionists for the facts we see, I find their explanations wanting. They have to posit things that are, quite frankly, absurd, and the only reason they’re not pointed out as absurd is because they control most of the conversation that can be had. [Sound like being inside the LDS Church?]

For example, in caves there are sometimes massive stalactites and stalagmites, and currently the rate of increase is minuscule, so they take the current rate and claim that that must have been the rate for the whole time it grew, and thus it’s been growing for millions of years. But that also means that we’d have to believe that the tiny drip-drip-drip of water has never once been different, and that there have never been any earthquakes or other things — in millions of years, mind you! — that would alter or disrupt the flow.

We’d also have to believe that about 200,000,000 years ago, the continents split up, forever separating the Americas from Africa-Europe-Asia, so that the last common ancestor of the big cats existed prior to that time, yet big cats of the Americas can still interbreed with big cats of Africa & Asia, though separated by some 200 million years, while humans and chimps split apart only 5-6 million years ago and can’t interbreed.

We’d also have to believe that, “in the beginning there was nothing, and then that nothing became something, and exploded, and became everything — every star, every planet, every moon, every comet, and every rock plus all the water on earth, AND then somehow, despite all known science contradicting it, nonliving matter came to life, and that single original lifeform became the ancestor of every form of life on earth, from algae and fungi and bacteria to every kind of plant and all animals (including fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals), from tiny gnats to giant blue whales. And then you’d have to endure folks mocking the idea that all dogs from teacup poodles to Great Danes came from 2 dogs on the Ark, or that all humans came from 8 people, while at the same time, they believe that all dogs and humans and everything else came from a single lifeform.

The evolutionary story is just that — a story. Evolutionists have to account for life as we know it and the universe as we know it, and they do so by looking at what we see today, and trying to account for it completely naturalistically. But that’s not science; it’s story-telling. True science would never exclude at the outset one of the possibilities, but that’s what modern “science” does — they exclude the possibility of a divine agent, and insist that only natural forces are allowed (though they never try to account for the natural forces themselves).

Imagine taking a walk with a friend and finding a watch. You say, “Oh, somebody must have dropped it,” but your friend says, “That’s ridiculous — did you *see* anybody drop the watch? No! We have to account for the presence of the watch by completely natural forces, without postulating any unseen ‘person’ who might have made it or dropped it.” I suspect he could come up with some “just so story” of how a watch might possibly have been made, over a great length of time, by natural forces that just happened to come together in the right places at the right times to create the watch as it exists and to have it appear where it did for you to find it. But if the watch was indeed made and dropped by humans, his fantastic story is just that — a story, and a wrong one at that. By excluding human intervention at the outset, your friend has prevented you both from arriving at the truth, since the truth is that the watch was made and dropped by humans.

Now imagine the above scenario continues, and just after your friend has given his story of the naturalistic origin of the watch, someone comes up and says, “Oh, that’s my friend’s watch; we were here yesterday and he realized that he dropped it somewhere, so I’ve been helping him look for it.” Then your friend sneers at him and says, “That’s ridiculous! You can’t just come up and claim that some human dropped the watch! We’ve already agreed that this watch came about only by natural forces, and you can’t come up to us telling ridiculous stories about having ‘a friend’ that *nobody has ever seen* who just *happened* to drop a watch yesterday. No! Only *natural forces* are allowed to explain the existence of this watch!!” He then turns to you and says, “Can you believe this guy, wanting us to believe such a ridiculous story? Especially since I’ve already clearly explained how this watch arose completely by the forces of nature. What an idiot!”

In my analogy, the person who pops up and gives a first-person account of his friend having lost a watch is an eyewitness of the events that led to the watch being on the ground. Now, just because he claimed to be an eyewitness doesn’t mean he actually was; he could be lying. That is when we start to look at the claimed eyewitness to see if he’s trustworthy. The Bible is.

It has been proven accurate in every historic claim it makes that can be tested (though many things can’t be tested, admittedly). However, there have been very many historic claims it has made that, in years past, “experts” assured us were false… and then they were found to be true after all. In fact, I remember a quote from some archaeologist or historian who said something like, “Don’t bet against the Bible; it has a way of being right in the end.” In the 1800s, historians claimed that the Hittites never existed, but then they were found. Historians used to doubt the existence of Pontius Pilate, but then evidence (a statue or tablet or something) was found. Similarly, historians claimed that the book of Acts had historical inaccuracies (one particular example was the use of some title for a particular man), but then a paving stone of the man’s name and that title was found. So, not only was Luke right, but because the man held the office for such a brief time, it shows that Luke must have been written by someone close to the events.

Further, the synoptic gospels all record Jesus as predicting the destruction of Jerusalem within the “generation” (about 40 years), and that happened. Of course, you can claim that the gospels were written after it happened, so “of course” they got it right, but Christians did not remain in Jerusalem prior to its destruction, citing Jesus’s prediction of its destruction, which means that prediction existed prior to its occurrence, regardless of when the gospels were actually written. So, Jesus correctly predicted what happened. The gospels also have such marks of authenticity that it caused an atheist cold-case detective to become a Christian (Jim Wallace, of ColdCaseChristianity.com). And since Jesus affirmed the OT, I have great reason to accept that as authentic and Scripture as well. After all, if someone predicts his own death, burial, and resurrection, and accomplishes that, he definitely deserves to be believed, and you’re going to have to offer a lot of evidence (not just bluster and “what ifs”) to outweigh such a testimony.

And Christianity itself did not begin in a vacuum, nor was it based on the testimony of one man (like Mormonism and Joseph Smith — *everything* rests on him). Rather, Jesus was constantly surrounded by disciples (sometimes thousands witnessed miracles as well as heard His teachings), He was publicly executed in Jerusalem and His grave was guarded against the disciples being able to steal His body, and it was in Jerusalem itself that Christianity began. This is important, because it’s relatively easy to con people who can’t verify what the conman is saying, but Jerusalem was where the events happened, so it would have been easy to refute the claims of the disciples, if they were indeed false.

Responding to an anti-Trinitarian article

A link to the article was posted in a Christian group, by a self-described “baby Christian”, who was needing guidance in how it was wrong, and how (or even if) she should respond to the author, who has been her mentor in Christianity.

Let me say that I was very glad to see that she didn’t just blindly follow what the mentor said when it came to denying the Trinity, but instead began to question it, and the mentor herself.

I am posting my responses because I think there is some value in them, even though I didn’t even attempt to give a point by point rebuttal, but instead start at her “Text 3”. (As one person in the group said, “it would literally take a thesis to write everything that’s wrong in her statements here.”) I was wanting to give her short refutations to show that they could be answered, and that she was actually wrong. (As I say in one of the responses, I don’t have to prove her wrong in every single point; if she’s wrong in one point, such as Jesus not being Jehovah, then her whole premise falls.) One thing I didn’t mention is “What Really Happened at Nicea” (PDF here). The others bear refutation or at least response and explanation, but I don’t have the time or energy to do so right now. Most if not all the things she brings up are answered at AOmin.org, using the search function there.

Text 3: John 1:1

She’s factually wrong about John 1:1, when she says that “in the beginning was the Word” means that the Son had a beginning. You mentioned Dr. James White’s book “The Forgotten Trinity“, and I’m pretty sure his rebuttal to this claim would be in there. He’s a Greek scholar, so I would trust him on this far more than an ex-New-Ager who may not even know the Greek alphabet, much less what the Greek is saying. I’ve listened to and read a lot of his stuff, so I know that on this point, he says that the Greek of John 1, when it talks about the Word existing before the world, uses the verb tense that has no beginning; and the tense changes to denote “in time” only with things like being born into the world.

Text 4: John 10:30

I don’t intend to respond to every point, because then my responses would be lengthier than the chapter; however some are very easily refuted. Further, her position doesn’t have to be disproved in every point; if she’s wrong in one place, her position is wrong, since it all stands or falls together.

However, what she says about, “I and my Father are one” meaning “only one in purpose” is easily refuted by the context of what happens when Jesus says it — the Jews took up stones to stone Jesus. And they said it was because Jesus was making Himself to be God! That shows Jesus was not meaning merely “we’re one in purpose”. And if she were to say that the Jews misunderstood Jesus, why didn’t Jesus stop them by saying, “you misunderstood me”?

Text 6: Isa. 9:6

I really was going to post only one or two comments at most, but…

The article is like a train wreck — you can’t look away, lol.

I kept reading, and must respond to her claim about Isa. 9:6, that “properly understood”, the verse doesn’t mean that Immanuel’s name will be “wonderful counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace”, but that it “really means” that Jesus will proclaim His Father.

Here is a good example of why we don’t use Strong’s Concordance to overthrow the translations done by people who actually *understand* Hebrew. There is what is called “semantic domain” for every word. Some have a very narrow and precise meaning, while others are more broad. Sometimes a single Hebrew word can have multiple meanings in English (and vice versa).

As an example of this in English, take the word “range”, which can mean anything from a shooting range to a prairie or even the cooktop of a stove. Now, imagine someone insisting that the song “Home on the Range” is talking about living on a stove, since “stovetop” is one of the acceptable meanings of “range”.

Not one of the English translations, most done by committee (so, groups of Hebrew scholars who must agree with each other, not just a single person who may “go rogue”) has the meaning she claims.

Further, if you look at Strong’s concordance for the word, while “call” is frequently used by the KJV as the translation, we might equally use the word “name(d)” much of the time. Scroll down and see that most of the first page of results, means “to give a name to”, particularly if it’s used with “name” (such as, “called it/his/her name Adam/Eve/etc.”).

Some of this can almost be “bait and switch” on her part, because in a sense, naming a son “Seth” (such as Adam and Eve did), is “proclaiming his name” — I make proclamation that “his name is Seth”. Yet I’m also giving him his name, or “naming him”. But even when I’m “proclaiming” his name, it’s me saying his name or giving him his name, it’s not him turning around and proclaiming something else.

I’m no Hebrew scholar by any means, but I’ve seen enough bad arguments drawn by other non-scholars using Strong’s Concordance, that it makes me very wary of any argument like in that article — especially when it’s something against literally every translation done by qualified people. If she couldn’t defend it in a debate against a qualified Hebrew scholar, she shouldn’t use it to make this sort of claim.

Her conclusion

Her final paragraph reads as follows:

It is indeed the destiny of each and every human being and each and every angel, without a single exception, to enter the Eternal Kingdom of God of the New Heaven and the New Earth as created and adopted sons of God, and be part of the one huge united Elohim Family of God; the Family of the one true Father God, Yahweh Elohim, and His only begotten Son Jesus Christ, Yeshua Elohim.

I admit that I could be mistaken, but it seems like she is saying that Jesus is not Yahweh/Jehovah/YHWH. So I of course had to respond to that, since it can be so easily proven that the NT writers did indeed refer to Him that way!

One last thing — her conclusion distinguishing between “the one true Father God, Yahweh Elohim, and His only begotten Son Jesus Christ, Yeshua Elohim” seems to be saying that only the Father is called YHWH, and the Son is not. This is false, and can be proven using many NT passages which quote OT passages that were about YHWH, but which NT authors say apply to the Son.

These include but are not limited to… the ending verses of Psalm 102 quoted in Heb. 1:10-12; John 12:41 quoting Isaiah 6; Isaiah 8:14 and 1 Peter 2:8; among many others.

In short, if Jesus is identified as Yahweh in the NT (and he is!), her whole argument is void.

Someone else in the group reminded me of Jesus’s “I AM” statements, which made me think of this:

…at one point (I think in the gospel of John), Jesus tells the disciples something, and says, “I’m telling you this before it happens so that when it happens, you’ll believe that I AM.”

Apparently in the Greek, it is a quote or near-quote of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the OT) of one of the prophets (I’m thinking it’s Isaiah 42:9, “Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them.”). The OT is YHWH speaking, and the NT is Jesus speaking, and both are saying, “I’m predicting the future so you will know that I am God.”

Out of Body Experiences

Recently, I’ve been studying several aspects of New Age. It’s been something hanging around the periphery for a while, but some of Heidi’s posts have sounded very New Age-ish, so I got intrigued by it and wanted to know more. (Don’t worry, I’m not inclined to believe any of it! In fact, in just this brief time, I’ve discovered many contradictory beliefs, which on top of everything else makes it impossible for me to believe it could have any validity. Rather, I am trying to understand what she is thinking and what she may have been told / what she has read that makes her think that it is viable and/or that Christianity is wrong.)

Anyway, to that end I’ve been following Doreen Virtue on social media, and have been listening to Steven Bancarz interviews. These are two very prominent former New Agers who have become Christians, renounced N.A., and are now exposing errors and problems in N.A.

This is one such interview, and about an hour in, they talk about out of body experiences, or OBEs, because both he and the interviewer had had them. Steven talked about research that proved that some were real, and this included stories of people who had an OBE in which they saw something they could not possibly have seen any other way. For example, a woman who saw some label on the top of a cabinet in the operating room while she was unconscious and being operated on. Those sorts of things give me chills.

He went on to say that just because some are real, it doesn’t mean all are, and specifically questioned many of the stories of people who claimed they died and went to heaven, saying that such experiences could be demonic in origin. Here’s my problem with that, though — if he believes some OBEs are demonically influenced, why cannot the “real” or “verified” ones be similarly demonic?

It was almost like he was saying that if an OBE can be objectively verified, it can’t have been demonic. However, that is a non-sequitur. Surely if demons can infiltrate a person’s mind so that he thinks he’s gone to heaven, a demon can do the same and cause a woman to clearly see a label on the top of a cabinet. The latter seems far easier to me, in fact.

That said, I’m not necessarily accusing someone of having opened themselves to demonic influence, when there is no evidence for it other than that they had this one experience. My point is simply that he seemed to have a logical error, in excluding verifiable OBEs from being possibly demonic, just because they could be objectively verified, rather than being merely subjective experiences that anyone could claim to have, and no one could prove them right or wrong.

Why we should avoid snap judgments and get both sides of the story

I didn’t hear about this story about an El Paso teacher at the time, but admit that the clip sounds really bad. Turns out that the clip is greatly missing context:

But a student in the class says the video doesn’t give the context of the conversation, which was regarding the play The Crucible, a dramatic retelling of the Salem Witch trials, largely seen as a critique of McCarthyism and the failed attempt to root out communism in the 1940s and 1950s. The student explained,

“She was expressing how it was ridiculous how we might not be able to call people pedophiles. That we will probably have to start calling them MAPs because it can be offensive to them. The class agreed.”

This is one reason why “believe all women” is as shortsighted and trite as saying “believe all men”.

How to Apologize

I used something similar to this with my kids, and it really did seem to help. And it was far and away better than the method my parents used, which went something like this:

Mom: “Tell him you’re sorry.”

Me {usually still seething with whatever anger was the original cause of whatever offense I was being made to apologize for} — I glare at my brother and sarcastically (often even singsong-y) say, “SOORRRRRRYYYYYYYYY!!!!!”

Such an “apology” was sometimes worse than nothing at all. And to make matters worse, sometimes we were required to hug, even though we had not actually reconciled because the offender was not truly sorry. I was determined to do better for my kids, and when I saw the method laid out above (not precisely this, but close enough), I saved it and made sure I implemented it. A step that is preliminary to the first step in the meme, when teaching kids how to apologize, is to make sure that they understand why they’re apologizing in the first place. An apology is necessary when you’ve wronged someone (especially unjustifiably), but most people act wrongly because at the moment they felt justified. Again sticking with children, if 5-y/o Betsy slaps 6-y/o Johnny, she slapped him because she felt justified at the time (and if she slapped him because he pushed her down, maybe she was indeed justified, so that he is the one who owes the apology — or perhaps they both do).

An example of how this worked out with my kids is as follows. Let’s say that Kevin knocked over Sam’s tower of blocks, and Sam was angry about it. I would require Keith to say, “I’m sorry that I knocked over your tower. It was wrong because it was your tower and your work, and I had no right to destroy your work. Next time I will ask you first if I can knock it down. Will you forgive me?” The exact wording may vary, but the steps (what I have in bold) would be the same.

At the bottom of the above image are several examples of things that are not actual apologies. I agree that they aren’t. However, their inclusion here made me think that they are given as things one is never allowed to say, if someone comes to you claiming an offense. Here’s my problem with that, though — what if there really was a misunderstanding? Should you have to apologize because someone else misunderstood something?

Imagine someone coming to you and saying, “When you told Jenny that I was ugly, it offended me,” and you know that you never said the person was ugly, are you supposed to say, “I’m sorry for saying you’re ugly”, when you know you never said it? That reminds me of Anne of Green Gables, when Marilla thinks Anne has stolen her amethyst brooch. Anne denies it, so Marilla confines Anne to her bedroom until she confesses (hoping to recover her treasured possession). Anne wants to go to a social function, so she finally confesses that she took it and it accidentally dropped in a pond when she looked at her reflection on a bridge. Soon after that, Marilla finds the brooch caught on a shawl, and realizes she had forced a false confession out of Anne, and that now she has her own apology to make.

What if the person really did misunderstand? I’m made to think of the movie “The Mighty Ducks” in which Emilio Estevez (playing the character Gordon Bombay) has to coach a misfit kids’ ice hockey team as community service for drunk driving. At one point, Gordon has a conversation with the coach of the other team (Coach Reilly, who was Gordon’s own hockey coach when he himself was playing kids hockey, and who was trying to discourage Gordon from even trying to play with the ragtag team), and Gordon sarcastically agrees with Coach Reilly and says something about how they are bad — so bad that they don’t even deserve to live. Of course, one of the kids overhears it and tells the rest of the team, and they mutiny against Coach Gordon, and tell him why. He explains it was sarcasm, and thus, he actually meant the opposite of what he said, and that they misunderstood him.

Here again, had he simply apologized, they would have thought that he did actually mean it when he said it; by explaining his true motive, they understood that he never meant or believed they were no good, and then they were able to unite behind him and become an actual team — with a goal to beat the horrid Coach Reilly who really did mean the unkind things he said about them.

So, while I will agree that one should only rarely or never give the “non apology” responses listed at the bottom, that applies only when one actually has offended. If the other person really did misunderstand or misinterpret something (or if someone lied to them about what the other person supposedly said), then explaining it is very valid, and indeed, is the only proper response.

Remember, the left claims to be the party of tolerance

NY’s governor tells people who disagree with her to leave the state, because they’re not wanted or welcomed there, and they don’t represent NY values. Even though the majority of counties in the state are majority-Republican. Nice, huh?

Also, I recently saw these two posts from someone:

[For greater context, this is the same Kara who interjected herself into what was my peaceful attempt at a conversation with Heidi. It says a lot about her! And unfortunately, since people tend to become like those with whom they associate, it says a lot about Heidi too.]

While the main purpose of the post is to show how hateful and intolerant the “tolerant, loving” left are, I will also speak a bit about what was in Kara’s posts. Granted, I don’t know much about the particulars of the two things she was talking about, and I would need particulars to speak particularly about it (the first was a bill which would supposedly reduce inflation [it won’t!], and the second was in the context of student loans). Still, I can speak generally.

Insulin

I can be as upset as anybody about the cost of insulin, while still thinking that it might not be wise to have a cap of $35 per vial. What if it costs $50/vial to produce? Companies will simply stop making it, and then people will be completely without insulin, and that’s not a good thing.

Further, why is insulin so expensive? Twenty years ago I was a pharmacy tech, and most forms of insulin were in the neighborhood of $20, if I remember correctly. What typically happens with any drug is that the company who created it has a patent for some period of time (I think 14 or 17 years, though R&D often eats up a good portion of it), and during that time, the company has exclusive rights to sell the formulation, which it does under the brand name. Once the patent protection runs out, any drug company can make the drug, and this opens up competition, so the cost of the drug drops dramatically, as the companies compete with each other for market share, which usually means dropping their prices to attract customers. Why hasn’t this happened with insulin? I’m not sure, not being in the biz anymore.

One thing I do know is that it’s often the case that once a patent expires, the drug company creates a new, similar product and tries to get doctors to move their patients over to that. It’s possible that this has happened with insulin, so that the products available when I was a pharmacy tech are still technically available and may even be cheap, but doctors are writing expensive forms of insulin, which may be better, but aren’t necessarily that much better. [Again, this is speaking hypothetically, based on my experience with other drugs.] If this be the case, then there should be a push for doctors to write prescriptions for these older and perfectly adequate drugs, rather than just complaining about the cost of insulin.

If somehow this is not the issue, then I would question what if any policies currently in place are contributing the high cost of insulin, and what can be done to change those policies or enact new ones, to bring down the cost, without placing a legal cap on the cost of insulin, again, to avoid unintended consequences which may be devastating (such as people who need insulin to live, not having any at all because it’s not cost-effective to make it).

America would flourish?

As for her second post, which was about student loans, I’m sure you’ve heard all the arguments for and against why they should or shouldn’t be “forgiven”, so I won’t go into that. Instead, I want to focus on her statement that “America would flourish if we stopped with the conservative, Christofascist, and Republican rhetoric about bootstrapping your way through the world”.

I’d like to ask some clarifying questions of this person, to try to get definitions from her as to what exactly she’s talking about, since it seems like she can’t mean what it sounds to me like she’s saying. Because “conservative” typically refers to “continuing to do things the way things have long been done”. So, it sounds like she’s saying, “America would flourish if we stopped doing a lot of the things we’ve been doing”, but that shows an alarming and outstanding amount of ignorance about human history, since the greatest amount of flourishing that America and indeed the world has had, has been because of the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” mentality and “rugged individualism” that was practiced for most of America’s history.

Horrific

From Not the Bee, this is what the aftermath of so-called “gender affirming” care (actually gender-denying care) can be:

And here’s a story of a young woman who had “top surgery” (breast removal) as a teenager, and now regrets it, because she “detransitioned” and knows she’s a woman, and now she will never be able to nurse any children she may have. She feels like she was lied to and misled, and that it was too easy for her to be put on hormonal treatment, and that her root problem was body image issues. She needed confirmation of herself as a girl/woman, not to be told she was actually a boy/man.