Just got out of a meeting, and something is on my mind.
I’m a little tired of hearing folks use certain terms as slurs for intolerant, mean, or non-thinking. especially when they themselves are doing the same disservice.
Here’s a few.
A liberal to me is someone who is very accepting of other folks, live and let live. Not someone who gets outraged at someone having a different belief, but a tolerant person… a liberal to my mind is about as open minded as one can be.
Christian. woo. here’s a big one for me. Using Christian for hatemonger or mean-spirited is about as backwards as you can get… Even if you don’t buy into the JC sort of philosophy, you’d be hard pressed to say that the teaching of Jesus is a bad thing. Please, don’t let the actions of a few zealots cloud your view of the whole. (That goes for everything, by the way… like calling all blacks criminals, or all men rapists… or all single white males serial killers.) When I hear my pagan pals malign someone by calling them Christian, or referring to the “Christian mentality”, it’s like me hearing someone called a “Nigger”. (Which used to just refer to the color of someone’s skin, before a bundle of hate was tossed behind it.) On a side note of religion, using Jew to refer to being cheap or worse, making a verb out of it… “Tried to Jew me down at the bake sale”… makes my ears just turn off. I simply don’t want to even hear what the person has to say anymore.
wow, got so put out there, I can’t even think of the other examples I was going to give.
I’ll return to this thought later.
pardon my rant.