Brad,
Later this morning I will be going into an outpatient lab to find out whether or not anything can be done to salvage this wrecked body so that I may know - barring accidents - the amount of time I may have remaining to enjoy this world. It’s something that I’ve known about for a little over a month and it’s really no big deal - I have been blessed in this life and hope that I have repaid some of those blessing with and by God’s grace, for on my own I have nothing to boast.
I’ve printed your appeal and stuck it, along with a pencil with eraser into the bag I’m taking just in case there is no way to use the laptop (also going into bag - small laptop, small bag) or connect to the Internet while in hospital (which I would think quaint and very 19th century, but you never know…) so if I’ve a chance I will read your appeal more carefully, make notations, and return with a comment or two - perhaps even a rebuttal - in the next day or week or so.
Several points that you make bear repeating time and time again. As you wrote in your introductory remarks, your final ‘testing ground’ for apologetics was “posting on discussion boards” and this remains a place where skills can be developed: as you go on to say, “This last is a hallmark of modern lay apologists, and I’ve found that what someone writes on a website can be a good indication of their approach to apologetics in the rest of the world” this is where our views, or beliefs, begin to diverge and it’s likely at this point that I would like to begin the conversation, for I feel that that which is written on a website makes one lazy, and even sloppy, for it creates a dependency on tools which the ‘Speaker’s Corner’ apologist lacks, which can never be made available to those who debate on a stage and are not, in fact, the most useful tools that one can find when apologetics is presented in the form of newspaper or magazine articles or, even, books. I make that last argument for two reasons: 1) what one finds by ‘Googling’ can often be so overwhelming that the reference one seeks might very well be number 176,072 as ranked in a listing of 333,688 listings and it is the rare man (or woman!) who will make the first 175,000 clicks without giving up in frustration, and; 2) what one finds by ‘Googling’ can often be so under-whelming that one wonders if one is losing or has lost one’s mind.
As an example of the latter, last week I wanted I quote from an author from a specific book I had just completed a few weeks before. The author is well-known and of the early 20th century, the book well known in the public domain and while not found at every corner drugstore is usually available at most major bookstores (specifically at the ‘super stores’), and the bon mot itself so well known that I have heard it repeated again and again during my life. My search query, no matter how broad or compact never yielded ,ore than two ‘hits’, and even then did not reference the page number or original date of publication, and sometimes resulted in zero ‘hits’. In frustration, I walked the 25 feet to the appropriate bookcase, found the book and the information I needed and was done within a minute or so. One might think - and might be correct - that had my sequence of words (name removed by moderator)ut been just so I might have yielded greater numbers of hits, or that by using various ‘paid’ services for search engines, my yield may have increased. I concede both these points - what I cannot concede, however, is that from years of using Lexis/Nexis my search skills are certainly in the ‘good’ category’ and that on this particular day it was my walking to the bookshelf skills that needed more exercising than my search skills and it was certainly THOSE skills which paid off. Had I been in Hyde Park ready to make my parry, a wireless connection would have done me no good while a scrap of paper secreted away in a match pocket, or a quick comment on the s;y to a more knowledgeable friend, could well have proven to be my saving graces. I am no Luddite but sometimes there is simply no replacement for being able to read, to read well, and to be able to recall from memory the most minute fragment of information.
So where we would initially disagree, I think, is that you find that “what someone writes on a website can be a good indication of their approach to apologetics in the rest of the world” while I find the opposite ti be the case: that initial reading and use of this type of website is, these days, the initial approach to apologetics and can only provide the initiative and not the result of an education.
I will concede, however, that I may be wrong - for the simple reason that there were no websites in 1946 or 1947…
More to say - more to agree and disagree about; more, I hope to discuss. Need now to sleep if able. More later, I go hope - you’re a bright young man, obviously full of faith and love - such a wonderful thing to see these days.
