It may be the time of year when the world falls in love but if you’re a young fundamentalist the course of love never runs smoothly. If you happen to have the fortune to be in a fundy camp where “dating” is not considered to be a dirty word, it still doesn’t mean that your romantic endeavors will be anything less than awkward and strange.
The main problem is that there just isn’t a whole lot of space to get to know someone in the confines of the fundy dating scheme. Dinner at a nice restaurant? Only if you bring two chaperons (and pay for their meals). Take in a movie? You must be joking. Bible conference? Ah! Now there’s a real fundy approved dating venue. Nothing says romance quite like listening to an evangelist yell.
In fact, other than sitting with the object of your affection’s parents in their living room watching The Sound of Music, church and Christian school activities are really about the only other approved dating venues. Parks, beaches, public streets and Walmart are locations much too fraught with temptation to allow young people to hang out there together unsupervised. Even if they’re 36.
Good luck having those heart to heart moments where you share all your hopes and dreams and say silly things as those in love are wont to do. Hopefully, your chaperons have the decency to pretend not to notice.
It is never enough to use only one logical fallacy when forming a fundmamentalist argument. The building blocks of nonsense must be gently bludgeoned into place one atop the other to form a wall of illogic that stops thought and runs one into danger of exhausting their Latin vocabulary. Consider these beautiful bits of logic…
The Post Hoc Ad Absurdem Non Sequitur: “Prayer being taken out of schools led to the founding of the Emergent Church which will eventually lead to everyone being unsaved, drunk, and buying foreign cars.”
Or perhaps the Ad Hominem Circulus in Probando “Emergent Church types are nothing but a bunch of unsaved drunks becuase nobody who drinks that much could possibly be saved.”
My personal favorite is the Plurium Interrogationum Ad Verecundiam “Are you still an unsaved drunk Emergent Church member even though that’s clearly unbiblical?”
Line upon line. Precept upon precept. Fallacy upon fallacy.
Two years ago I got bored and started a blog. It wasn’t the first time I had done this — I’ve been writing somewhere on the Internet for the better part of a decade. But for some reason, people showed up to read this one and add their own thoughts and insights to my few ramblings and reminiscences.
Today, this site has had almost 600 posts, over 1 million visits, and (most importantly to me) 27,000 comments. You’ve all been very busy.
Looking forward, I honestly don’t know how much longer I’ll write on this particular topic — or at least write on it with this frequency — but I’m thankful for each one of you who takes a few moments from your day to read here and contribute to this community. I appreciate your encouragement and all the e-mails with stories and suggestions that show up in my inbox on a daily basis. I only wish I could do them the justice they deserve.
