As it's an election year, many, many of my ordained colleagues want to make sure that I think and vote "the correct way", keeping all of my perspectives, notions, thoughts and what the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick called "pre-thoughts" [those thoughts you might be inclined to have sometime in the future] in line with their own.
After all, they're clergy, so their perspective is better, smarter, and more morally evolved than anyone else's. In fact, if you disagree with them about any point, or even ask an innocuous and apolitical question about an apparent contradiction [Example: How can we be against capital punishment and pro-choice in the abortion issue and still be theologically coherent?], they will offer to "educate" you about "the correct way". A successful "education" simply means acquiescing to them on every point.
So, my e-mail box, Facebook account, and regular old post office box [I don't think the Office of Peace and Justice has a computer yet, as all of their correspondence comes to me in hand-addressed envelopes] are chock full of political appeals, each seeking some satisfaction that I am in complete, total, and near-lobatomic agreement with them on all matters.
If I'm not, I'll never get on a diocesan committee. My professional world is so strange that this is actually considered a punishment.
Anyway, as a piquant response, in the spirit of Aristophanes, Alexander Pope, and Mark Twain, I thought I would spend today posting items easily found on the Internet that might cause my colleagues' heads to explode a little.
Also, even in my profession, every once in awhile one must assert his right to think independently. Sometimes tweaking a figurative nose is the best manner of declaration. Rather like Ishmael [the one from Moby Dick, not the Old Testament] and his desire to knock people's hats off their heads. [That quote is on the first page of the novel, if I recall correctly, so no one has to read the whole book to find it.]
Those of a delicate nature are advised to come back tomorrow for more prosaic postings.