Well the Bible also says that Jesus stated "If someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well" (Matt. 5:40, NIV) So if they sued you for $25k to be Christian you should have given them more than $25k. Right?
Thank goodness our nation is not one of biblical laws!!!
Historically, from Greek to Roman and I am sure in many other ancient civilization. Lawsuits were used all the time! The we are a litigious people and society if not new. It goes back thousands of years.
LOL Scott, that is taken a bit out of context. Funny though.
From a favorite sci-fi novel, “The Plutonium Blonde” by John Zakou
“A brief bit of history here. 2035 was a seminal year in the annals of law and order. The number of practicing lawyers in the world had been increasing at an alarming rate since the turn of the century. As a result, by 2027 fully 10 percent of the world’s population were lawyers (subsequently, 9.9998 percent of the world’s population were crooked lawyers). The enormous amount of litigation these lawyers created simply overwhelmed the world’s court system. They were suing corporations, they were suing small businesses, and they were suing executives, subcontractors, and day workers, municipalities, organizations, and homeowners. Only the homeless and indigent were spared from the litigious siege (and only because they had no money to lose).
Some lawyers even specialized in suing the dead. They were easy targets after all. You always knew where to deliver the subpoena.
By 2035, the courts were tied up in so much ridiculous litigation that there was simply no room in the system for any real legal work to be done. The United States Supreme Court, for instance, had to expand their roster of judges from 12 to 120 in order to keep up with the increased case load. Sadly, however, there was an annual suicide rate amongst the justices of 25% (when you’re in for life, there is only one way out). The legal world was quite simply a powder keg ready to explode.
The match that lit the fuse was the infamous case of Rindulli v. Rindulli, St. Louis Missouri, 2035, in which 12-year-old Elizabeth Rindulli sued her parents for making her ugly. Her suit contended that her parents, Benjamin and Juanita Rindulli, were ugly people (the term used in the suit was “beautifully challenged”) and were therefore responsible for the ugliness of their daughter. Furthermore, the suit asserted that the Indulines had prior knowledge of their ugliness before Elizabeth’s conception and their procreation showed a reckless disregard for her well-being.
Elizabeth sued for punitive damages. The exact amount has been lost in the annals of history, but it is well known that her parents were extremely wealthy, after having been awarded a sizable settlement earlier that year from a fast food company when Benjamin spilled an iced coffee, that was negligently chilled to too cold a temperature, onto his lap while going through the hover-thru. Apparently, the three-degrees-above-Kelvin mocha latte froze his genitalia in a particularly embarrassing position.
Elizabeth Rindulli won the case and the world went crazy (or maybe they finally gained their sanity). The poor girl broke down on the courthouse steps and confessed to the world that she never wanted to pursue the litigation and never even considered herself ugly until her lawyer approached her and convinced her that she was.
That’s when the revolt began. The public had had enough and set out to rid itself of the litigious epidemic. The outcry was Shakespeare’s immortal quote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” (from Henry VI) – and for most people, it was the only line of Shakespeare that they ever really understood.
The World Council stopped short of actually killing all of the lawyers. They instead formed a series of focus groups ant eventually decided that the optimal number of lawyers on a world of 15 billion people would be 7777. So through a series of aptitude tests, coin tosses, and popular votes, the 7777 lawyers deemed most worthy got to remain lawyers. The rest were disbarred and forced to get real jobs (many became game and talk show hosts). The number of lawyers allowed to practice on the plane has been kept at a nice safe level of 7777 ever since.
After the purge, by the way, Shakespeare’s popularity grew enormously in the mainstream. Unfortunately, people no longer considered him a playwright. Instead, he became sort of a prophet and a number of cults devoted to deciphering the “prophecies” hidden in Shakespeare’s plays sprung up around the world. As a result, the King of Denmark was assassinated, every Roman senator was imprisoned, and special swimming clinics were organized for all women named Ophelia. It just goes to show that appreciation of great literature can be taken too far.
It’s worth noting that some people (like me) think the number of lawyers left in the world is still too high. Case in point, some of the sleazier lawyers who didn’t make the 7777-cut, yet weren’t ready to give up their litigious lifestyle, simply went underground, slide back into the shadows, and began doing their work undercover. Thousands of these “darksharks” are now employed by corporations under the job title of “greeting card salesman.”
So sleaze is still out there. It just goes by a different name.
And incidentally, sales of greeting cards have plummeted in the past ten years.
when he said turn the other cheek, that what he really meant was to hamstring the offending bastard when you had the chance?
