Friday 26 December 2008

Fools


Please open to the book of Proverbs:

26:4 Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.
26:5 Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.

Um...WTF?

7 comments:

Jeff said...

It'll be interesting to see what contrived explanation someone comes up with to explain why this isn't a contradiction. Because there are no contradictions in the Bible.

Robert Madewell said...

You do know who the fools are, right?

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good. Psalms 53:1

Yep, atheists are the fools. No wonder fundies hate me so much. Their holy book says that I do nothing good and that I do horrible things.

GCT said...

Robert,
If anyone calls you a fool for being an atheist, just remember to tell them to look at Matthew 5:22.

Anonymous said...

Are you from RP?

GCT said...

What is RP?

Joffan said...

It must be a koan... intended to break the mind out of logical thinking. Even if it wasn't intended that way, you can still use it as such.

Now as an occasional admirer of that lateral thinker de Bono, who when he's not being a pompous prick has some interesting things to say, this can be a useful effect to strive for sometimes.

Can one both answer and not answer? In a sense, yes: politicans do it all the time. They are more towards the negative side of appeasement, responding without either agreeing or disagreeing. I'd like to see more in the way of challenge. Answer the fool, but not within his conceptual frames, which would leave you "like unto him", but with a fundamental challenge to the mindset which might pull him out of "his own conceit".

and 98c change from a dollar.

Joshua said...

Ok. Be reasonable. This is clearly intended to be a deliberate apparent contradiction. No one would be so stupid as to put two verses together just like this without some sort of rhetorical effect intended.

There are serious contradictions in both the OT and the NT. However, this simply damages the signal to noise ratio.