Speaker's Corner Arrgh!!

I went to Speaker's Corner yesterday for my communications class. We were supposed to listen to the people on their soap boxes and analyze how they got their point across blah blah blah. It turned out to be very interesting and no one really spoke to you the same as anyone else. There was this one guy apart from the rest of the crowd just standing on his box. My friends and I actually passed him at first not sure if he had anything to say or not. My friend railkat decided we should go back and stand in front of him, kind of as a joke to see if he would actually do anything. As we're standing there he looks at us, says, "the entertainments over there" and just returns to ignoring us. It was really quite odd, he catches your attention by being silent and then simply sends you on your way as if to suggest that what should be being said isn't and that we are just wasting our time listening to the kind of people who do preach from soap boxes.
Well we continued on and listened to several different people. I am taking a class on Christian-Muslim Relations, it focuses on educating Christians so that they can have conversations with Muslims without being at each others throats. I had hoped to find someone at speaker's corner with whom I could put all of my new found knowledge to use on. So as we wonder on I notice a man preaching Christianity specifically to those of the Jewish and Muslim faith and right below him is a Muslim man trying to combat what he is saying. I thought it was a little bit rude for him to be making so much noise right next to the other guy but I thought that maybe if I engaged him in conversation I could lesson his draw on the other man's speaking and have the conversation I had been hoping for, wrong. We actually did get into a decent conversation to begin with, well I guess I must admit it was more of a heated debate then a conversation. We didn't really have anytime to go anywhere in the conversation before this other lady jumped in trying to back me, I think, and muddying up the entire thing. I was trying to make all of my arguments agree with both their basis in my Christian beleifs but also with my knowledge of the Qu'ran and the Muslim beliefs. I was doing this knowing that showing a respect for the religion would give me a better chance of a decent conversation. This other lady jumps in spouting Christian nonsense (see definition below) with no supports keeping the Muslim man and myself from having any flow of topic since he was trying to combat both of us. To make matters worse my other friend reaches into the crowd, grabs my bag and tries to save me from an argument that is now completely pointless due to the womens cancerous attachment and I, not wanting to give up push him off and lose my train of thought. A few minutes later I admit defeat for the moment, promising to be back the next week to continue, and disentangle my self from the surrounding crowd. I realized at that point that the man had not been listening to what I was saying since it took me so long to get answer to wether or not he was there regularly. I do plan on going back but this time with my notes and my Bible and my Qu'ran so that I can pull and point as fast as he was and hopefully get him to take me seriously. Somehow, I feel it may be completely pointless but I won't give up after as fruitless an argument as that.

Christian nonsense is a frame of mind as well as a collection of keywords and phrases spouted by someone who really doesn't now what they are talking about. They are usually insufficiently backed up, fractured and completely useless in an discussion with people who have studied the current topic of debate. Unfortuneately that is where they usually show up. The frame of mind being a person who believes something, has not done the research to back it up and argues it as if it was a universal fact. An example from the mentioned argument was when the Muslim man asked if the Bible had contradictions and errors in it. Someone who uses Christian nonsense, the lady already mentioned, immediatly says no with out giving anythought to the question, simply seeing it as an attack that must be defended. My answer was that yes there are contradictions but not errors. With the belief that the Bible was inspired by God but written by man quite completely explains the contradictions that are found in the Bible. You have one event witnessed by multiple people and they wrote what they remembered leading to their own background, education level, etc. to effect the exact words that are written. The contradictions deal with small detail that do not have any great affect on the teachings as a whole.