On arguing

Halfway through my latest pregnancy, I have discovered the simple joy of picking fights online.

Not ad-hominem insult-fests, mind you, because I’m classy. (Also grumpy.) No, I am in the process of conscripting the internet into my own personal debate club, for fun and no profit. Is it trolling? I mean, maybe? Whatever it is, it’s entertaining, which is good when you’re laid up in bed and you’ve sent your partner out to buy Nik Naks for the fifth time in a day.

This started shortly before Passover, when I got into arguments debates on Facebook and Twitter about whether the Last Supper, as depicted in the Gospels, was a seder. Now, this seems quite obvious to me – I mean, a) did the Last Supper even actually happen, because probably not; b) the Synoptic Gospels clearly appropriate Passover imagery in order to draw parallels between Jesus and the Paschal lamb; plus c) the Council of Nicaea specifically had to divorce the celebration of Easter from the Jewish calendar for Pesach, indicating a definite relationship between the two holidays.

But of course, I was arguing with linguist Jews, who made the point that the word ‘seder’ specifically denotes a Rabbinic-era Passover dinner complete with haggadah, and is not an overall term for a Passover dinner. Then my rabbi friend told me that the term used for ‘bread’ in the Synoptic Gospels is the Greek Ἄρτος, which specifically denotes leavened bread. This is what happens when you argue with people who literally have an entire holy book comprised of rabbis arguing with each other. Mess with the best, die like the rest, Sonya.

Eight days without leaven just made me even more grumpy, so when I saw a shaman friend arguing about psychedelic therapy with a Western doctor I jumped in, admittedly with my elbows out. Now don’t get me wrong, I think that the recent surge of interest in the medicinal properties of entheogens is a good thing – however, I find the dismissive attitude of the Western medical establishment towards the shamanic community, which has been medicinally using entheogens for thousands of years, to be irksome at best, and medical colonialism at worst.

This second argument was both more and less successful than the first one, because while I won it (or am at least claiming victory as the opposition left Twitter for a couple of days for inscrutable reasons which, in my fantasy, relate to being out-debated), it was rather shorter, confined to one social media platform, and my follow-up tweets CC’ing other Western MDs for expanded debate were ignored. Well, that’s what I get for tweeting on shabbos.

In retrospect I’m left wondering whether my latest predilection for online debate is related more to pregnancy grumpiness, Passover grumpiness, or an intersection of the two. Hey, at least Passover’s finished now, enabling me to eat Nik Naks again. (But has chametz blunted my debating edge though? Only one way to find out…)