How do you make pasta? Do you add salt to the water? How much salt? Do you add the pasta before the water boils or after? Do you boil it with the lid on or off? Which pasta is the best? Can you use the cheap brand or do you need the imported, Italian stuff?
You've got to carefully choose the time, the mood and the company when you decide to raise the topic of pasta. It's fraught to say the least.
That's nonsense, of course. Everyone can talk about pasta any time they want and no one freaks out. If, as I have been saying lately on this blog, religion is just a holistic description of the world as it is, that topic is no different than the way you cook pasta. After all, your way of cooking pasta is simply your educated selection of one of a set of candidate methods. You've thought about them, you've tried them, you've observed the results, you've weighed the evidence and now you make pasta your way. If you can discuss one, you can discuss the other.
If you can evangelize pasta, as one of our sons and his wife do with their homemade pasta, you can certainly talk about how the Universe was formed and how you derive meaning from life.
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| Heck, the Pastafarians combine the two. |
Ah, but but the fly in the ointment is that most people want to violate the moral law at will and yet escape the consequences (especially the temporal, easy-to-see consequences). Since that's usually not possible, the next best "solution" most people arrive at is to ignore the reality of God and of real morality, and to get hostile when the subjects are broached.
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