Usage of some of the great names of human history has been twisted to the very antithesis of what made them famous. To the driver who gets hopelessly lost following an easy route, "Way to go Magellan!" To the one who makes a boneheaded mistake, "Deep thinking Einstein!" In this vein I have come up with another, "Tear 'em down Paul!" I guess that like "Cher" or "Madonna", our well-traveled explorer Magellan or our big-brained scientist Einstein, are quite well known. However, the name Paul is kind of a common one, so I should attempt to explain myself.Paul, the apostle of Jesus Christ, wrote a good fraction of the New Testament of the Bible. In his younger years he belonged to a group of ne'er-do-wells known as "The Pharisees". Paul's job was to harass the crap out of anyone who dared to call themself a Christian. In fact, his unquenchable passion was to root Christians out into the open and work to shame them, beat them down, and at times, to kill them. Then one day at the peak of his crusading, God confronted him and he changed teams. Boom, just like that.
A guy I work with garnered some major international attention several years back for his work. However, it was eventually found that his findings were wrong and his approach kind of naive. Where once he strutted around like a proud rooster taking every opportunity to seek credit and make his name known, he was forced to deal with his damaged reputation. Recently he has taken to beating down anyone who dares tread upon the smoldering embers on the ground that he had soiled. He unmercifully attacks those who make many of the same sorts of mistakes that he made. "Tear 'em down Paul!" Now you may think that I am sitting up on my lofty peak shaking my head at this poor soul. Quite the contrary, I recognize myself in his ways. It leads me to recognize that the measure that I use to pass judgment on others, will also be used on me.
