Name the behavior

Yesterday I got a comment on my blog from a post that is almost four years old. It is hard to imagine that I have kept my blog that long. I am not what you would call a steady blogger, but only because I set up my blog for myself, as a record of my thoughts, my interests and my experiences, and not for any greater altruistic ideas.

None-the-less, occasionally people stumble across my blog and some even leave comments. For the most part the comments are discursive; some insightful and others brilliant. Other times they are strange, even ugly, like the time I received an angry rant of a comment from a guy claiming to be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

They say there are topics that one should avoid in polite company. I think the list is sex, politics and religion. Though I am not sure. Either way my blog doesn’t really shy away from these topics, so I am bound to get a little push back from people that hold contrary opinions. Different opinions I can tolerate, though it is hard to swallow negativity, and I am never sure how to handle these situations gracefully. In the instance involving the individual claiming to be Ahmadinejad I deleted the comment because, in my opinion, it was disparaging against certain religious groups and I really don’t tolerate that kind of behavior.

I suppose that brings me to the comment I received yesterday.  It is not a very well written comment, and in reality I should probably just ignore it. But the problem is that I think there is something veiled in the comment that is disparaging of others and, as I said before, I don’t tolerate other people’s bad behavior.  In fact I could let the whole thing go with a shrug if it hadn’t been for the last line in which the speaker says “You can keep your warm fuzzy.”

In one sentence the speaker has summed up what I believe is the problem with most organized religions, namely that statements of faith can masquerade as an argument, and that this argument once presented should be understood as incontrovertible.

I have no problem with the statement that the speaker makes regarding his faith in Jesus, however to suggest that this somehow negates or otherwise refutes contrary opinions is a fallacy and worse, it subtly disparages other groups who may hold differing opinions. While it falls short of outright condemnation of others, it does fall dangerously close to a discriminatory attitude towards people of differing ideas and beliefs.

Sadly, intolerance always seems to be the answer to intolerance. Which is why these debates seem endless and never appear to reach resolution.  I say that I find the speakers position intolerable, and then they counter with an equally entrenched attitude until we are so far from common ground that any reasonable settlement seems impossible. You see it in the Middle East and Western Europe, you see it in the politics of the United States and countries of the orient. Things cannot get better this way, they cannot.

There are many challenges to addressing contrary opinions, especially when they are entrenched in topics that are so loaded. Still I believe that one can refuse to accept unacceptable behavior without intolerance or violence. I think that it is important to name a behavior that we find unacceptable, to call it out, lest we allow these attitudes to perpetuate themselves unchallenged. That is why I would say that I am glad that the speaker has found Jesus, and would ask him to remember that “God is Love” and not wield the name of Jesus like a sword in a conversation about how ridiculous the generic use of the word “green” has become.