Is this term a distraction? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
I have often said before that there are two words in our society that are practically meaningless. Those words are God and love. It is not because I deny the reality of those words. It is because in our society, we take them to mean whatever the user thinks they mean. If you meet someone and they tell you they believe in God, it doesn’t mean they’re a Christian. It doesn’t even mean they’re a monotheist. The Mormons will tell you they believe in God, but their god is a vastly different being than we have as Christians.
Likewise, we have such vapid sayings in our culture as “Love is love.” What if I told you, “Glork is Glork.” Well, by law of identity, that would be true, but it’s meaningless if you don’t know what glork is. Besides, if you want to say all love is equal, no one really thinks that. Do we want to say that the love by a group such as the North American Man-Boy Love Association is love? If a person wants to have an affair with their dog, will that be love? (Brace yourselves. If the path is not stopped, defending these will come soon enough.)
Another word along these lines is hate and it gets tossed around too much. For one thing, we treat all hate as bad. It isn’t. You ought to hate some things. I’ll go further and say if you don’t hate some things, you are a demented individual.
Really? Yes. I hate that children are sexually abused. I hate it when someone commits suicide. I hate it that innocent people are mistreated. As a divorced person, I definitely hate divorce.
I also hate all of these things because I love something else. If you love children, you don’t want to see them abused. If you love life, you hate suicide. If you love justice, you hate seeing the innocent mistreated. If you love marriage, you hate divorce.
In our day and age, and especially in “Pride Month”, if you say that you disagree with something, you are accused of hating the individuals. For one thing, this is really getting into mind-reading which has no basis. For another, it really has no point. It really gets the debate to be about the mindset of the person instead of the data.
Let’s take two people. The first one will be a white supremacist. He is talking about the unhealthiness of the black community and he talks about how many black boys are fatherless. He uses this to look down on the race. Now let’s take Thomas Sowell, a famous black economist. He goes and talks about the economic state of black America and that too many black boys are fatherless.
The claim is true in both cases. The reasons for holding them are different. Thomas Sowell has no joy in what he says. The white supremacist does. However, what matters is the data. Now you can be more suspicious of the white supremacist, but data is data.
Now talk about same-sex sexual behavior. On the one hand, you have someone who is a Fred Phelps type from Westboro Baptist. He makes a statement about rampant disease spreading in the LGBT community. He can do this with glee seeing it as a judgment of God. On the other hand, you can have a doctor, perhaps himself same-sex attracted, from the CDC who says that men who have sex with men are at a higher rate for disease. Both are making the same claim. Now you can say the doctor is better qualified to speak, and that will be granted, but the claim is the same.
Having someone say you have hate for a group doesn’t touch the data. It just talks about you and frankly, if they believe that, how could you convince them otherwise? Why should you really care if they think otherwise? It’s just as much a smokescreen as saying bigot or hater or X-phobe, whatever the X might be.
And too often it works.
If anything, you could turn around and ask the person why they hate you for disagreeing with you. If it works for them, why not do it yourself? Could they ever prove that they don’t speak from a place of hate? No. It’s the exact same problem.
In every case, what really matters is the data. Name-calling and other such behavior is really just a way to avoid the issues. That is where the battle really lies, which is probably why they don’t want to talk about them.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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