I had the same thought, what if I were gay…wait, I AM! So yeah, I’d be wary. But then I thought, how the hell do I know they’re coming from a Bible group? Do I have some sort of telepathy? And what the hell am I doing there? Am I cruising for some rough trade? What if I was in drag? I’m so confused.

Wouldn’t we feel just as safe if we knew the ten guys were literary theorists or biochemists?

Oh, hell noes! Literary theorists scare the bejeezus out of me. Terry Eagleton is a mean drunk with an even meaner left hook.

Y’all think it’s funny, but your town has never been overrun by gangs of roving literary theorists, deconstructing old ladies and decanonizing city parks. I still have nightmares.

Someone hold me.

I’m curious what sort of religious study Prager thinks might go on in Belfast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miami_Seven
They were coming from Bible study.

I would actually feel even better about this if I knew they were coming from their “theoretical banking concepts” seminar. I KNOW I can take a bunch of punk-ass, high-interest pushing bitches.

Miami always get the good ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh_ben_Yahweh

I’m intrigued to know if Dennis Prager is aware of any connections between Judaism and Bethlehem.

Wasn’t this an episode on the original Star Trek?

Wait a minute. You mean you *don’t* have super strength and laser eyes?

Then what am I wasting my time for, reading all this?

(But seriously. This is what he’s reduced to, the Prager. “Oh yeah? Well what if a bunch of guys LOOKED dangerous but you were told that they studied the Bible? See? Doesn’t that mean that people who study the Bible are better than a gang of ‘men’ in a dark alley? Gotcha!”)

I think this can be held up as the day the saying “every answer gives birth to even more beautiful questions” died

Dennis has a point here. I think these drooling idiots hopped up on moonbeams and Jebus dust wouldn’t be much of a threat.

I’d fucking roll ’em.

Rifle their wallets, smack ’em around and give out a few judicious atomic wedgies.

Just sayin’.

If a group of 10 men approached me in a city I didn’t know… I’d need a shitload more context to begin to answer the question.
Is this a safe city? Am I in Montreal? Is it gybe! that’s approaching me? All I’m at risk of is it being the wrong 10 of em and a dull performance.
Or is strange supposed to mean populated by brown people and/or others who might not closely resemble me? Who might even be Muslim?
I object to the basic premise that a group of men approaching you in a city is a threatening thing.
Maybe they’re just crossing the street?

…some sort of after-hours Bible Study group.

Pastor Ted’s excuse-to-wifey number one. Also two, three, four, and integers thereafter.

Oh, hell noes! Literary theorists scare the bejeezus out of me. Terry Eagleton is a mean drunk with an even meaner left hook.

Just so long as they’re not language poets. *shudder*

I have always specified “Bible class� because I assume that in America, anyone with common sense would in fact be very relieved if they knew that the 10 strangers, all men, approaching them in a dark alley were committed to either Judaism or Christianity and studying the Bible.

It’s so asinine it mocks itself, then pours you a drink for your trouble.

Ten men? I’d say it must be a minyan just come from saying kaddish for Dennis Prager’s ability to reason.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c1xlBwzWZ8
For the shorteez.

Um. I’m sorry, can I ask a really stupid question?

Thanks.

What city have you EVER been in, at pretty much any hour, when you couldn’t see about ten people? I mean, if you’re just boppin along, nobody around, and then all of a sudden there’s ten dudes? Well, it’s late, and it’s dark, so I’ll cross the street. If they start across the street? Kill ’em.

Ok, now, what was the question?

mikey

in hollywood, they woudl be coming from a) a scientology seminar in which case it is ON xenu style or b) an AA meeting, which is bible class for pussies. and i’ve got to tell you, ten jittery maya-maya caffeinated failed actors chain-smoking and talking like they are still on the coke…yeah, that would scare me. a lot. but i would use my prager-fu on them, confusing them with bullshit analogy and poorly written and ill-considered musings, until they submitted and gave me a column in a major newspaper.

Listen, Dennis, you little weasel, there are fucking *priests* I wouldn’t feel safe alone with in the fucking *sacristy*. And I’m one of thousands across the goddamned country, so screw you and the hypothetical you rode in on.

Oh, and, I can’t believe I’m the first to volunteer. There there, Jillian. There there.

What if it’s a dozen sinners coming from a prayer meeting in a Salvation Army, which was actually a front for an illegal floating craps game; and what if the guys were not only just cleaned out of a wad of cash (adjusted for inflation in real dollars) by Sky Masterson, but had to endure a flat rendition of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight?”

I’d get out of their way.

Or, hell, what if I just thought there was a chance they might proselytize me against my will?

Mikey seyz:
What city have you EVER been in, at pretty much any hour, when you couldn’t see about ten people? I mean, if you’re just boppin along, nobody around, and then all of a sudden there’s ten dudes? Well, it’s late, and it’s dark, so I’ll cross the street. If they start across the street? Kill ‘em.

I was in DC once after 10ish, walking down the street just south of the Mall, where all the Bureau buildings are. Walked a good six blocks down and back. Only saw about three people the entire time, and that’s including the security guard.

Creepiest damn thing ever. I kept expecting the zombies to find me and chase me down and eat me. I have no stamina, I’m easy zombie prey.

How does this flogger think he has hundreds of thousands of listeners. Messianic……

If a group of 10 men approached me in a city I didn’t know… I’d need a shitload more context to begin to answer the question.

You just know, OK! Can’t you just accept the bullshit premise?

My favorite wingnut “WHAT IF” scenarios relate to the wisdom of gun ownership. They’re always impossibly unambiguous, like if a naked, screaming madman was running at you with a hard on and waving a bloody machete and a severed human head, and there was was no way you could escape and no chance you could miss him and hit an innocent bystander WOULDN’T YOU RATHER HAVE A GUN??? GURRR???

In DC, if you’re in a neighborhood in which you can see no one around, and then there’s 10 guys standing around you – you’re going to get mugged. Shit, we got plenty of churches – there’s a better than even chance you’ll be within one bloack of a church when it happens. Where will your messiah be then?

Most likely in a better part of town.

I assume that in America, anyone with common sense would in fact be very relieved if they knew that the 10 strangers, all men, approaching them in a dark alley were committed to either Judaism or Christianity and studying the Bible.

I remember the worst housemate I ever had in college. When he and his buddies weren’t drinking my listerene, stealing my food, breaking into my room to rifle my pr0n collection, tweaking and falling down the stairs, and thereafter trying to start fights with me because I was within 50 feet of that incident, or hiding from the cops who came to arrest him for beating up a homeless guy because he wouldn’t accept Jesus as his personal saviour, he was… wait for it… at bible study.

Bite it, Prager.

What does he mean by “approaching”?

Some Guy- Imagine the same experience at 4 am in the Brooklyn ghetto. I live across the streets from infamous projects and it’s the spookiest damn thing. Usually there’s somethin bumpin at all hours on the corners, but one weekend night I came home and didn’t see another person for the blocks from the subway to my place.
Didn’t even see a moving car, though I went the quiet way.
I ended up walking past my door to a deli just to make sure humanity still existed around me.

This Leonard Pierce fellow is most amusing. I’m glad he’s here.

Julie O.: Sit down, you’re rocking the boat!

anyone with common sense would in fact be very relieved if they knew that the 10 strangers, all men, approaching them in a dark alley were committed to either Judaism or Christianity and studying the Bible.

Depends. Like ADB, I want more context about the hypothetical scenario. Am I wearing my “Fuck Jesus Sideways with a Folded-up Koran” t-shirt?

In my neighbourhood, a group of ten guys at 2 in the morning ain’t coming from no bible class. Usually the bible guys are roving at 10 AM on Sunday and I’m rarely awake, never mind outside, at that hour.

10 guys walking down a DARK ALLEY telling everyone they meet “We just got outta Bible Class!”

Sounds like the beginning of many a lynching to me…

I’m curious what sort of religious study Prager thinks might go on in Belfast.

If it was really “bible studies” it wouldn’t be my papist cousins. But frankly, in Belfast at 2am, even if they’re coming from an actual Torah study session they’re shitefaced drunk and looking for a fistfight, so if either Dennis or Hitchens had any smarts they wouldn’t be out on that street in the first place.

10 convicted armed robbery felons recently released from jail who’ve just gotten out of a court-mandated “therapy” session run by a faith-based organization that was essentially a Bible class. I’ll take Terry Eagleton any time.

I’m GLBT and I can say from personal experience that ANY group of 10 young males is a potential threat. That includes Bible class attendees. Extra special attention if this strange city is in the South or any other region of the US known for hate crimes.

I’ve posted here infrequently but I like your humor. So for the sake of this argument and to refute it categorically for all time… I’m transsexual and yes I have cause to be afraid of 10 young men just leaving Bible class.

I live in the inner city and gangbangers I can handle. It’s the boys from the suburbs that I’m most afraid of. They are the ones most likely to assault me because of who I am.

Not surprisingly, even a guy like Hitchens can see that this question is as loaded as Florida State communications major on a Friday night.

Now THAT is Teh Funny.

Some Guy, zombies are highly overrated as predators. I find they pretty much are just interested in stealing your last can of soda, opening and closing your doors in the middle of the night, and other such incredibly lame practical jokes. My advice is to just poke them with a wooden spoon, they’ll go about their business.

And A Different Brad, I’ve done that, lots, but I’m demonstrably crazy.

dude! don’t forgot the best hypothetical question of all time: what if my name was pony?

just sayin’.

ps: i miss you, preview.

owlbear1 said,

Sounds like the beginning of many a lynching to me…

Sounds like the beginning of a really hot gay porn flick to me.

So many questions! Why are these guys having Bible study in a dark alley? Wouldn’t they they be better served in a brightly-lit alley to facilitate their reading their Bibles? Or even a dim alley? And why ten guys? Isn’t seven the most magically powerful number? Why not a Baker’s Dozen guys, or even a Gross of guys?

May I just mention that I’m embarassed to have Christopher Hitchens on my side?

Not surprisingly, even a guy like Hitchens can see that this question is as loaded as Florida State communications major on a Friday night.

It’s true, Communications is one of the majors where the sorority girls who can’t cut it in FSU’s B-school (and how sad is that, really?) end up. It was one of the reasons I briefly considered Communications as a major when I was there; then I realized I would never be able to respect myself again if I went through with that.

And just for the record, Communications is also one of the two “football majors” at Florida State. The other is Criminology.

If your car ran out of gas on a deserted country road, and a hook-handed man came up and started scratching on the window, wouldn’t you feel relieved to find he was a performance artist working on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts? Can there be a clearer illustration of why conservatives are misguided in their opposition to federal arts subsidies?

atheist–

Don’t be. Read God is Not Great.

Major Woody–

This: “Sounds like the beginning of a really hot gay porn flick to me.”

Made me go ha-ha and fall off my chair. Well, all but.

Oh, you all are making me laugh.

I had to actually go read Prager before I could be sure, but after I did what struck me as hilarious is that in response to Hitchens, Prager actually loads up his own question with enough shaggy dogs to compete at Westminster.

Hitchen quite nicely neutralizes the question – “In a strange city as the evening was coming on. Toward me I was to imagine that I saw a large group of men approaching.”

Prager re-states his own question as “10 strangers, all men, approaching them in a dark alley”.

Now I’m curious to read Prager’s original question, but it strikes me that Hitch, by omitting any descriptive menace (dark alley) or personal menace (approaching them) actually give Prager’s question a more fair try out than it deserves.

If Prager indeed expects us to imagine ourselves in a dangerous place being approached by menacing people, and then ask ourselves if we feel better because they’ve just been studying the Bible, then he’s fucking bug shit crazy.

And the question is as contrived and stupid as “What if you had to get a terrorist to tell you where the bomb was hidden and it was programmed to go off in ten minutes?”

But the question of whether, in a neutral yet unknown situation, if we saw a group of people coming in our direction, would we be more or less alarmed if we knew they’d been at a religious gathering – kind of an interesting puzzle.

I hope this doesn’t mean I’m going to waste my morning trying to find Prager’s original quote.

I actually was in a strange city last January (Charleston, SC) and it was after dark, and there were at least two groups of strange men wandering around the city. One was a group of sales representatives for an academic press, and the other was a employees of some kind of multinational shipping conglomerate, at a team-building gathering.

If you could broadly interpret “approaching you” as sitting next to you at some bar, the book salesmen were terrifying enough, as they droned on and on, promoting their musicology or linguistics texts.

But it was the team-builders that were truly a menace. Clad in indentically logo-ed polo shirts, they commandeered the hotel bar, pushing the tables together, chugging their beers and singing “Sweet Caroline” at the top of their lungs. For some reason a lot of them were Aussies and Taiwanese and Germans, and they all loved Neil Diamond. During the daytime, they had a scavenger hunt, and you’d see terrorist cells of them rampaging through the historic homes of Charleston with their printed tote bags, shocking the volunteer docents as they bounced drunkenly up and down on Charleston’s historic joggling boards.

It was a terrifying illustration of religious extremism.

All this reminds me of an old joke:

A guy is walking through the empty streets of Belfast one night. Suddenly, someone grabs him from behind and holds a knife to his throat. A menacing voice whispers, “Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?”

The guy, not knowing the identity of the assailant thinks fast and quickly says, “Neither! I’m Jewish.”

The menacing voice sighs happily and says, “I must be the luckiest Arab in Belfast!”

Thank you. Try the veal. Drive safe!

It’s the boys from the suburbs that I’m most afraid of.

Goddamn right. My fiance and I walk around downtown, nobody fucks with us. Not the homeless people, not the crackheads, nobody.

Unless it’s Saturday night and the boys from the ‘burbs are in town. Then there’s some yahoo shouting comments, honking horns, making threatening gestures, etc. just about every 10 feet.

And I bet they’re all in bible study the next morning.

I, personally, would bring up the question of what the fuck are ten Jews doing studying the Bible?!

One would think Prager, of all fucking people, would be aware of this, but the Jews do in fact have their own books to read. Particularly given that “ten guys” is the number of Jews required for a proper religious service to go off the hizzie..

But hey, I guess it just wouldn’t be a Prager column if we didn’t further confuse the issue of the distinction between Judaism and Protestantism (because I’m sure when he means Bible study, he doesn’t mean any filthy Catholics).

Haven’t you heard? In wingnut-world, the Jews and the Christians have all been assimilated into one big happy Judeo-Christian conglomerate. Nope, there’s never been any tension between Jews and Christians; we’re all on the same team against the Muslims, and that’s what counts!

Have to admit, it’s good to get this explicit statement from Prager that when he talks about religion as a source of moral behaviour, by “religion” he means Christianity and Judaism.

Just thinking now that my mate Fraser, who runs the Bar Bodega, should consecrate the place as a church. I’m visualising a big sign outside: “Bible study classes, Thursday, 10 p.m. – 2 a.m.”

That would make me “inexpressively happy” as Prager calls it, although the Frau Doktorin Penny seems to prefer the phrase “paralytic drunk”.

noen: I live in the inner city and gangbangers I can handle.

A few years ago I was heading to a gay bar in L.A. and noticed that there was a group of about 6-7 Hispanic men in their 20s coming down the sidewalk half a block behind me. Concerned about macho homophobia in that demographic, I picked up the pace a little, though I was relieved to notice a small older woman, clearly someone’s mama, walking with them.

An hour later I was in the bar — The Apache on Ventura Blvd. — when I looked towards the dance floor and whaddayaknow. There were the same guys, dancing and flirting with other patrons. And there was Mama, sitting on a bench by the wall, smiling and watching her son and his friends having such a good time.

You never can tell. And I’d love to see Prager parse that!

Can I play? Can I? Can I? OK, What if you lived in some small town in the Deep South instead of in the city. You’re black and just left church to walk home. It’s after dark. You come across ten white men who have also just left church. Should the black man be scared shitless or not?

Roket: he would undoubtedly be reassured, at that point, to see ten black men who are coming out of a Nation of Islam class, so Pragerism is vindicated once again!

Oh, I hate getting in late on the game, but these questions burn to be asked:

— If you were walking down a hallway in the White House late at night and saw ten senior administration officials, would you feel safer or less safe if you knew they had all come from a Bible study meeting?

— If you were walking down a corridor in the Pentagon and saw ten officers go into the room labeled “Nuclear Missile Force: Launch Codes”, would you feel safer or less safe if you knew they had all come from a Bible study meeting?

— If you were in the Level 4 Biosecure sector of the virus research laboratories at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta trying desperately to create a vaccine to stop the mutant H5N? avian influenza that was threatening to kill a third of the world’s population, and you saw ten of the top scientists and program administrators coming down the hallway, would you feel safer or less safe if you knew they had all come from a Bible study meeting?

— If you were a US Attorney who had decided not to pursue a bunch of bogus allegations of voter fraud and you saw ten DoJ senior administrators coming down the hall towards your office, would you feel safer or less safe if you knew they had all come from a Bible study meeting?

— If you were an innocent Uighur shepherd picked up by Pakistani intelligence and sold to the CIA for $20,000 as an “Al-Qaeda terrorist” and you saw 10 US military and intelligence personnel coming down the hallway to conduct your initial interrogation session, would you feel safer or less safe knowing they had just come from a Bible study meeting?

Oh, man. I could do this shit all night.

brooksfoe,

some of those seem fun, joo should write to Sr. Prego, er-uh, Praeger, and tell heem, no?

so.

i’d much prefer 10 stoners, where the interaction is guaranteed to be utterly passive. i don’t need to be converted on my scary walk home, thanks.