You don’t seem to get it at all. Not eating pork would be analogous to a Christian not practicing homosexuality. This might be sad if the person is gay, but no one I’ve ever seen has proposed that we should force any Christian to do anything with his or her body that they don’t want to.
The proper analogy would be for a Muslim to refuse service in his restaurant to someone he has observed previously eating pork in a restaurant next door.
I doubt that any Orthodox Jew would consider a gentile eating pork as an an infringement on his religious liberty. And I don’t think he would find anything wrong with selling plates that will be used for eating pork.
BTW discussing the eating of pork along with homosexuality makes me snicker, but I have a dirty mind.
The point being made is that there are religions that tell people how to behave. This behavior could be “don’t eat pork”. It could be “also don’t sell pork”. It could be “don’t be homosexual.” It could be “homosexuality is evil and should not be tolerated.” In all cases these are things that religions could say, and they’re all analogous in that the behavior comes from the religion, not the individual.
Trust me when I tell you that there are religions out there instructing proactive intolerance of things they don’t approve of.
:dubious: Hoo boy! This is going to be very hard to write, because it’s about a measured defense of someone I have lost considerable respect for.
I have attended a Sunday morning discussion group at a UU church for years. Sometime last year a regular drove me crazy with her shrill objection to the phrase “Black Lives Matter”. She really took it personally. When I objected that the founders of the movement were NOT saying that the lives of Caucasians were unimportant or less important, she sort of doubled down on her urge to correct them.
Well… Then, they should say “Black Lives Matter Too”
Sigh. I am losing the will to live, just thinking about it. I immediately thought of exploited male Black workers carrying signs saying “I AM A MAN!” I brought that up immediately, despite my discomfort. To me it seemed absurd that in either instance only Blacks were held up as human and worthy of basic human consideration. I was about to give a second example of my thinking but I hesitated and stammered momentarily, which somehow signaled to the moderator that I was talking too much.
There have been other ways this particular woman has driven me crazy (Yeah, I know, a short trip for me… 
) but that would be quite a huge digression.
But I will say that I doubt hate motivated this woman. She has not had the experiences I have had, and probably would have processed them differently were that the case. Her apparent defensiveness seems odd to me considering her relatively advanced age and the other views she has expressed. She is on a “caring committee” at the church and has worked as a nurse before retiring. She is oriented politically as a liberal because she wants to be on the side of compassion.
Without bending over backwards to be “understanding” of her I will say that she somehow doesn’t seem quite “bright enough” to be capable of significant hate. Yes, I can say that of someone who strikes everyone as having above average intelligence. Besides actual lack of brain power, plus learning disabilities, there is the matter of extreme blind spots. (I know about this kind of thing as a personal expert. :o )
Being Jewish I have nearly 2,000 years of that in my bones, so I don’t dispute it. However I took the post I responded to as saying that there was an equivalence between religion commanding you to do something that only involves you and religion telling you to do things which involve others. The first is okay in our society, the second is not in lots of cases.
What’s amusing here is that when the early Christians who still followed Jewish law found that forbidding the eating of pork and shellfish cut into sales, they dumped God’s command toot sweet. Via a convenient dream, or course.
Not sure I get this, but I’m betting that sign was a reaction to black men being called boys up until quite recently. If you don’t believe me watch “In the Heat of the Night.” That might be fiction, but no one at the time called it unrealistic. Sidney Poitier’s character says “They call me MISTER Tibbs” for a very good reason.
Sound to me like an example of white privilege, not hatred. She can’t conceive of the problem, since her children and grandchildren don’t have to go around worrying about being stopped for no reason or being shot by cops on flimsy pretenses.
I see the ham sandwich/hay view diffently. Christ had very little to say about homosexuality as compared to a wide variety of other issues. Certain Christians have chosen homosexuality as their hill to die on (so to spesk). Why don’t we see them opposing the mega-churches raking in enormous amounts of money to enrich corrupt pastors or refusing to make wedding cakes for divorced people seeking to re-marry?
“I have a Dream. That one day, Eli’s Pork and Crab Shack will be kosher for this new religion! Free crab cakes! Free Crab Cakes. Thank God almighty, we have free crab cakes with any order of 25 shekels or more.”
He’d probably appreciate it.
I disagree and have disagreed all along.
And the reason isn’t that black men aren’t at greater risk, they are. Or that society doesn’t see them as disposable, we do…and both those things are wrong.
The reason has been so eloquently illustrated by the MSD kids - by making their issue bigger than school shootings, by making it about more than white kids, they are able to create a bigger tent that encompasses more people. And they recognize their privilege and are using it to give voices to the under privileged
BLM starts by not being a terribly privileged population - they could use a bigger tent because it would bring more people to their cause and they could actually use some voices of privilege speaking out with them to bring them attention. It SHOULDN’T be the case that this is so, but the reality is, making this about Black Lives was a poor marketing decision.
Black Lives Matter protesters are trying to remind us of something that should be obvious: that black lives matter at least some. They are insisting this is true even though, in today’s system, black lives don’t seem to matter at all. They point out that black lives don’t seem to matter at all when police officers kill a handcuffed man in custody, shoot a twelve-year-old kid with a toy, kill a man shopping for an air rifle in a Wal-mart, kill a man during a traffic stop for having a taillight burned out, etc. etc. etc.
The interesting thing is Black Lives Matter protesters are only saying are that black lives matter at least somewhat. They never say black lives matter a lot. Or that black lives matter more than any other lives.
When people respond to Black Lives Matter protesters by saying that “All Lives Matter,” they want us to infer that they said all lives matter equally, but they didn’t bother to say that. It’s funny that they will infer extra words like “more” into “Black Lives Matter” when that inference makes BLM protesters look bad. In contrast, they want us to infer extra words like “equally” into “All Lives Matter” that makes them look better. In either case, the people saying “All Lives Matter” are relying on the inferred words to get to the meaning that they want.
The words we infer in either slogan matter a lot. What I infer from “Black Lives Matter” is that all lives should matter equally but that today they don’t. What I infer from “All Lives Matter” is that the person saying it believes that white lives and black lives already have their appropriate respective values in today’s America. That might mean they are a real hardcore racist who truly believes that black lives are deservedly cheap in America and they should continue to be so. Maybe they matter a little, but they don’t matter as much as making sure that white people who feel threatened or bothered by them should just be able to kill them when the feeling arises.
Less racist people might say “All Lives Matter” because they believe there is no racism and no devaluing of black lives in America today. That’s hard to believe if you look at the evidence, so I can only conclude that these people are deeply ignorant of what is happening in America today. I don’t want to throw my lot in with the deeply ignorant. That’s not what this website is about. The rest of the people saying “All Lives Matter” are just willfully ignoring the evidence that black lives don’t matter much because that suits them just fine. They are trying to maintain the polite fiction that they aren’t racists. I’m not buying their attempts to deceive me.
Worse yet, when people respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “Blue Lives Matter,” the only words I can infer are that “Blue Lives Matter more than black lives.” They seem to be suggesting that cops should be free to extinguish as many black lives as they want in order to protect only the blue lives that really matter. That’s a horrifyingly ugly sentiment.
IMO I’ve always interpreted “all lives matter” as little more than the speaker saying “shut up and go away.”
Back to the original question. Firstly Christians don’t hate. About a third of the world is Christian, I don’t think a third of the world is hateful. You’re painting with a broad stereotypical brush. I’m a Christian. I’d like to think I don’t hate anyone. I’ve marched in Pride parades, have a coexist bumpersticker and am part of the local interfaith organization. I guess I hate bad drivers, but I can usually forgive them after I’m at my destination. Regardless, a better rendering of your question would be ‘Why does a subset of people who claim to be Christian also have views that would be considered ‘hateful’ by others?’
That’s a good question. I think that part of it is that the views are not ‘hateful’ on an individual level, but rather on a group level. I think that in the case of ‘ALM’ these people don’t necessarily ‘hate’ black people and may even know quite a few black people and go to their homes and on an individual basis be quite friendly with them. Similar with homosexuality. They may not have any problem with individual homosexuals. I think that their problem is more large cultural touchstones and zero sum thinking. The things that they are standing against are things that seem antithetical to their group (white rural traditionalists) and they see movements in support of these other groups as attacking their own. They are also watching an erosion of their own culture and that can frequently encourage radical views and behaviors. An example might be that you have been going to ‘Shorty’s Pub’ for the last 20 years, you know the locals, you know shorty, it feels like it’s yours. One day, a gay couple come in and you’re fine with it, but then a week later, another couple comes in and after a couple of months, the bar has a large clientelle of gay people and you feel as though it’s no longer ‘your’ bar. This can cause a great deal of anti-homosexual feeling in you. You may know on an academic level that they have as much right to be there as you. Prior to this ‘invasion’ if we will, you may have had nothing against homosexuals, but because you feel as though your way of life is under attack, it can generate intense negative feelings. I think that what is happening in many Christian churches is a siege mentality. The reality is that the US is moving away from Christianity** (I do want to point out though that it’s not just Christianity. The issue isn’t truly with the religion. The real issue is rural white people who happen to subscribe to Christianity and use it as a rallying post. In many cases, Christianity is simply a bystander and not the driver of these trends. Christianity serves as a rallying point that gives them a moral high ground, but it’s not Christianity itself that is the issue. Urban and minority evangelicals don’t have these same behaviors.) **and those people who still are Christian (or again, more accurately rural and white Christian) feel as though their culture is being taken away and turned into something that is no longer theirs. This can serve to increase negative feelings towards those that they see as ‘stealing’ what it theirs. What you’re really seeing is a dying of this traditional way of life and these ‘hateful’ behaviors are really cultural ‘railings against the dying of the light’ and really what we’re watching is what happens when a culture is destroyed and how it responds to that.
All Lives Matter is only ever expressed as a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter. It does not exist on its own. Therefore it is not actually about all lives mattering, but an attempt to override it.
Blue Lives Matter is worse because it’s in response to people saying that police should not be racist. It’s thus defending that racism. It’s not something they said about cops before, but only in response to people saying “Hey, cops should try to be less racist!”
It’s just an obviously good thing. If you are being racist, stop. If not, do things to show you aren’t. Not fight the whole thing and make it seem like you really are racist and trying to defend it.
Still, I don’t really associate “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” with Christianity. My actual answer to the OP is above, and it’s just about how it’s easier to be a hateful Christian than a loving one.
I’m not immune, even if my hatred is directed in a different direction. I find it hard not hate all the people I see as being responsible for all the evil I see around me. Before Trump, it was much easier.
Which part are you disputing?
[ul][li]Are you saying that “you” don’t matter?[/li][li]Do you not believe that BLM was based largely on the cases of Martin and Brown?[/li][li]Do you dispute that Martin did reach his home, and then returned and attacked Zimmerman? Dee Dee said that he told her as much during their cell phone conversation. Do you think she was lying?[/li][li]Do you believe that Brown did not assault a police officer? Darren Wilson seemed to have facial injuries - where do you think they came from?[/li][li]Do you think that Brown was shot in the back? He wasn’t.[/li][li]Do you believe their deaths were not tragic, or that their parents were not devastated?[/li][li]Do you believe using these kinds of incidents to inflame emotion is likely to get the change they want?[/li][li]Do you not believe that police get the benefit of the doubt because of their job, but in general are held accountable when they go too far?[/ul][/li]Which of these do you dispute?
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t think I’ve ever been part of a long-lasting group of more than five people where someone didn’t manage to be a dick. Whether the behavior was curtailed or not had a lot to do with the power relationships, but if someone is a dick, they don’t stop being one - at most, they stop showing it too badly.
It has existed on its own in my life for at least 20 years. Its a central tenant of faith for me and something I heard said frequently before BLM came along. Because you are unaware of something does not mean it didn’t exist.
Tenet: : a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true; especially : one held in common by members of an organization, movement, or profession
Tenant: someone who holds something temporarily