I first became aware of Patton Oswalt due to his portrayal of the character “Constable Bob Sweeney” on the show Justified. He is also a standup comic.
Before I go any further, I tell you now that he is an atheist, he cusses, and he discusses religion. Don’t click on the link below if your sensibilities can’t handle it. I also warn you that it is not safe for work.
Oswalt does a bit titled “Sky Cake” in which he discusses his theory on the origin of religion and religious wars. He jokes that one of his ancestors, a weakling, convinced a bigger and stronger guy not to go around pillaging and that the reward for good behavior would be that when he died he would go to a magic city in the clouds where he would be served “sky cake”. He goes on to say that this worked well until someone from another continent sailed across the ocean and mentioned the “sky cookies” that he had been promised as a reward for not pillaging. This of course led to a war between the “sky cake” people and “sky cookie” people.
I draw a parallel to this bit and the respective groups in the firearms training community. Students pick their favorite guru and only the techniques taught by their guru are correct and everyone else is wrong. If it stopped there it wouldn’t be so bad, but as Oswalt said “sky cake only tastes good if other people can’t have sky pie”. It’s fairly common in the training community, which is a very small community, for the members of one camp to try to tear down members of another camp.
At times, the criticisms are legitimate. There are “trainers” out there who put out a bad product or who otherwise engage in behavior that rightfully earns a flag. As my friend Tom Givens says, “I learned something in every class I ever attended. Sometimes it was how not to do things.” Unfortunately, there are plenty of instances in which the criticisms that readily rampage about the interweb are driven purely by personality rather than legitimate discussion and evaluation.
Recently, I had the opportunity to review a set of videos by a noted trainer. The trainer demonstrated his method for performing a particular task. His method is different than the technique taught by my chosen guru. The first thing that flashed in my mind is, “That’s wrong. That isn’t how ‘my guru’ teaches to do that.” I almost stopped the video, but then I laughed at myself and thought, “You want training cake, and he is serving training cookies.” I backed the video up and watched the segment again. There was one part of his method that caught my eye, and after a little bit of experimentation, I was able to refine what I was previously doing while not abandoning my technique. It made what I was already doing better.
It was like having training cake with training cookie crumbles on top.
If I had completely shut out everything he had to say because his method wasn’t my guy’s method, I would have missed what actually became to me the most valuable portion of the video.