Tuesday afternoon in class, I offered my glasses to a student who forgot hers. She took them, put them on and immediately removed them. "Wow, you're blind" she said. Thus begins my exercise in logic and rhetoric.
They say that love is blind.
If I am blind, does that make me love incarnate?
They say that God is love.
Does that make God blind?
If I am blind, and love is blind, and God is love, does that make me God?
Justice is also blind.
Does that mean I am Justice?
That would certainly explain why I can't seem to get any if I am the source.
The point of this is simply to point out that logical arguments, when taken to their logical extreme, are not valid points of argument. There are people out there who like to use these simple associations that say:
If A=B and B=C, then A=C.
It might, but it does not necessarily follow that it must.
I think it forms the core of the technique by which people who want to control your life speak with you. They draw parallelisms with positive things and then extrapolate into infinity the same characteristics for themselves. Likewise, they are able to malign their opponents by comparing them to negative things, like Hobbits. Really, it comes from bad science. Like I tell my students, science never proves anything. It removes all other possibilities until only the truth remains. That is an original quote. Scientists like to think that their work proves things. It proves they MIGHT be related, but most people will argue that I am not love or justice or God, especially God, no matter how much He likes me.
Associating yourself with something great does not make you great any more than guilt by association makes you complicit. If Obama is not connected to Ayers and Wright and the whole kitten kaboodle, then you aren't soiled either. Just because Obama channels Lincoln to give himself credence doesn't mean he resembles Lincoln at all or that Lincoln would even like him if they met. If Ghenghis Khan picked his nose and so do you, does that make you like Ghenghis Khan? Didn't think so, and neither should you.
Human beings are not logical. --Spock
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