Once Upon A Time In Texas
By - Lee Myers
The Badass
There once was a man named Lee who had a brother named Peyton. One
day Peyton told his brother that he and a friend had been hassled by the
patrons of a bar in Jefferson, Texas. Lee made Peyton drive him all the way
to Jefferson to set things straight. He walked into the bar, said something
fairly provocative and all hell broke loose. Lee and Peyton found themselves
fighting every single man in the bar. At some point during the fight, Peyton
was knocked unconscious. When his brother woke him up and told him it
was time to leave, Peyton saw every single man in the bar—and two Texas
State Troopers—lying unconscious.
This is a story my father told me, told to him by his uncle, about my
grandfather. Now I have every right to retell this story, but I have no way of
verifying its authenticity, and neither do you. Every person mentioned in this
story is long since dead. It is simply a story told to me by someone else,
who was himself told by someone else.
Believe It or Not!
Robert Ripley made a career conveying unbelievable stories to the masses.
The attraction of these stories was that they aroused the natural skepticism
among us all. Well, some more than others.
Ripley’s stories ranged from tales of mermaids and monsters to lost pets and
sports. Some of these stories were more believable than others. It’s much
easier to believe an absurd sports statistic than it is to believe in the remains
of a mermaid. We know sports exist, so it’s easier to believe an outlandish
statistic about the record for most overtimes in a high school football
game—even if we weren’t there—than it is to believe mermaids exist, even
when we see a monkey’s head and torso attached to a fish tail being called a
mermaid.
Christians often ask why people don’t believe the stories of the Bible. The
answer, as Carl Sagan so eloquently stated, is that “extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence.” What makes the stories of the Bible so hard
for skeptics to accept is that they describe events that simply do not mesh
with what we know about reality.
We have no confirmed examples of water turning to wine, people rising from
the dead or a bunch of fish and bread appearing out of nowhere. These
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