A netfriend wrote (both persons shall remain anonymous, as the issue I want to raise here is about helping…)

<> You are a sick women, a very sick and Evil women. You do not and never have spoken for God. You are not God and only he matters. You are as nothing to me. Please pray to God seek his help and then become a Christian that Christ would be proud of. You opinion means nothing. The opinion of God is what matters.

My response:

If your diagnosis of ‘sickness’ is true – and I’m not commenting one way or the other, as I do that for a living, but come to newsgroups to get away from all that! – this raises the important question: how should a responsible, loving Christian brother or sister respond? I’m not sure the responses I’m reading – or the responses-to-the-responses – are helping in any healing process…

A very wise and godly pastor I knew used to say: ‘If you believe people are seeking attention for pathological reasons, the best and most Christian thing you can do for them is leave them alone.’

Another approach, which has been tried by a few: ‘Get help.’ But that sort of advice will only be given any credibility if it comes from someone who is believed to be ‘on my side’…

You can try logic but I wonder if this poster has counted up the number of times the response was ‘Yes, I was wrong…’ (How many? I don’t know, but if the number is near zero, I suspect logic isn’t working eh?)

Or you can try the tack of another poster: the ‘olive branch’ approach… I suspect there’s a bit of skepticism around about how long that will be effective…

Finally (for now); you’ve got to factor in the famous truism: ‘L’ami de mon ennemi est mon ennemi’ / ‘Der Freund meines Feindes ist mein Feind’ / ‘De vriend van mijn vijand is mijn vijand’… (Do those Babel Fish translations all say the same thing?)

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Shalom! Rowland Croucher