Excusing Anything for the Sake of Religion: A Comment on the Tyrone Forbes Case
The following is a comment posted to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette discussion board regarding the same subject as my last update, namely church elder, pastor and music teacher Tyrone Forbes' arrest and confession for having sex with a minor:
Do you people know that you cannot believe everything you hear or read? We live in a society where you people are so quick to pass judgements and you don't have A CLUE to what's really going on. What things are you hiding in your closets. Only you and God know. But all things done in the dark do come to light.Please do not comment on things that you do not know about. Do any of you go to this church? No! Did you see something with your own eyes? No! SO JUST STOP! There are families involved. His children don't need your judgemental comments. What about words of encouragement? The situation is a very sad one. What took place was wrong, but unfortunatley it's done. We need to be prayerful for the parties involved. Elder Forbes will pay the price for what he did. You reap what you sow. You people are sowing bad comments, it will come back to you. You never know what kind of situation you might face. You want to blame religion. We are all responsible for our own actions, and not the actions of others. This world was founded on Christians values but you all want to play GOD. There is only one GOD. You all want to say that the pastor sent him to N.H knowingly that he was in mess. I don't think so! Keep your mouth off the man of GOD.I'm sure that T.C. would be happy to know that I have no intention of putting my mouth anywhere on the "man of GOD" he/she is so concerned for.
-T.C
The only clueless individual, though, is the person who wrote that comment. Here's a guy who was caught red-handed and confessed, but that's not enough for T.C. because this individual is a "man of GOD" no matter what he does. He's given some sort of pass; we're not allowed to draw conclusions based on things like evidence or even a full confession.
Now, here's the screwy part. This same person has "faith," belief in things unevidenced. That's enough for this person not only to posit that something called "God" exists but that Forbes himself is the representative of this deity. The rest of us, however, aren't allowed to come to a conclusion about something we may not have seen directly but for which there is abundant evidence.
How exactly does this faith thing work, then? For people like T.C., it's something to be selectively applied for the purpose of continuing to believe in whatever he/she already believes and ignore any and all evidence to the contrary. That's all it is, not a thing more. In fact, we're supposed to be "prayerful" about the situation because somehow applying even more of this "faith" is going to change something. In TC's bizarro universe, this "world was founded on Christian values." Again, that statement is a product of the same sort of "faith." It clearly isn't founded on knowledge, which demonstrates quite clearly that this world was founded long before anyone ever thought of Christianity.
Christians often define faith in accordance with Hebrews 1:1, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
I'd like to offer an alternative definition. "Now faith is a willingness to imbibe the ridiculous, the rejection of the obvious."
