Great googly moogly, Bosda. How many times must this topic come up on the SDMB? Within the past few months, no less.
The Bible does NOT say “Thou shalt not kill. Period.” The original Hebrew is more accurately rendered as “Thou shall not murder,” and modern translations render it as such. In fact, apart from the old King James Version, the vast majority of Bibles that you are likely to encounter will translate Exodus 20:13 in that manner.
See this thread for the most recent discussion on this matter.
If it’s from family or friends, I thank them for the nice letter but I don’t respond at all to their points on the war. Everything else goes into the bit-bucket.
My best friend was fed up with a relative’s “Support Bush” spam campaign ,so he informed her that a donation to the ACLU, Human Rights Campaign, move.org.,etc would be made in her name for each e-mail. He followed through with his idea.
She stopped her Drudge-like Rush rants after her first copy of Southern Exposure(journal of the Progressive South) arrived in her mailbox. He has now nicknamed his relative “Shuck and Crawl”
I had this happen with a friend’s livejournal the other day. I’ll ignore it unless they start accusing me–even if via my position–of being anti-American. Then I will respond to that point, but none of the others.
“Oh, look, the incredibly conservative aunt (ICA) found my new email address (again). Oh, look, a delete button.”
~a day or so later~
“Oh, look, the ICA sent me the same email 5 times. I’m going to read this, and refute every single point she makes in it, but I’m going to use gasp facts!”
I respond the same way I respond to all unwanted messages: just delete. Unless it’s an obvious urban legend or false virus alarm, in which case I reply with the link to Snopes or whatever.
I’m on an email list that gets an occasional hit from the anti-war crowd, which is usual met by a multi-page rant about the uselessness of online petitions within five minutes, I just delete it all. I haven’t gotten anything from the pro-war crowd lately, but I did get an nice one telling me that if I didn’t immediately call up my senators and demand that they support Bushie’s multi-billion dollar handouts to the rich then I would be personally responsible for making millions of poor people lose their jobs.
Well for one how can they be friends if they don’t know your political stance?
Secondly, not everyone is against the war but getting those kinds of emails are stupid since you’re already in agreement with the issue.
Just be polite and enable a filter if they don’t get the point.
If someone sends me something that is obviously an urban legend or whatever, I let them know.
This war has caused not a few ideological skirmishes for me.
Had a sad and distancing back-and-forth email exchange with an (out of state) old friend about Iraq. We are leaving each other alone for awhile.
And then this week another (out of state) old friend sent me the Charlie Daniels thing. Then my uncle in California sent me another spam about how politicians are so much better educated than Hollywood types. I did politely reply to both; just very briefly stated my concerns about the war and what the future will hold, and also said that while I do not pay all that much attention to what actors think about the war, I also take what politicans say with a grain of salt.
Nobody has answered me, and they probably won’t. Will they think twice about sending more stuff? Dunno. But any more stuff will likely be deleted.
These threads here at Dopers Inc get soooo freakin’ long that I often skim over them after reading the first ten posts or so, so let me apologize in advance if someone has already posted this. I mostly delete without replying, but I used to send this to some real hardline, mouthy warmongers on occassion. Of course, with that “Coming Soon” heading, it’s kind of pointless now.
Anyway, I say (and often do) ignore them. They can’t be reasoned with for the most part, all many of them want to do is shout you down and insist that they are entirely right and everyone else is entirely wrong, and willfully ignorant to boot (same on the hardline left side). I know not all the people on the pro-war side feel that way, but until some moderates wrestle the mic/camera from the cold dead hands of a mouthy, arrogantly dissmissive warmonger, that’s the way most of us will be forced to see that side.
