Tag: homophobe

What is a bigot?

What does it mean if someone is called a bigot? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

According to dictionary.com, the following is what is meant by a bigot.

A bigot is “a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.”

Nowadays, a bigot is seen more often as anyone who disagrees with a belief or doesn’t accept it. The irony is that so many people who are using this term are the ones who are the bigots themselves. Someone who is a bigot is so utterly intolerant that they are not open to changing their mind.

There are some beliefs in my life I would say I do not think I could possibly be wrong on and this even if I have no easy way of verification. I consider it absolutely certain that my parents are my biological parents. I have never done a test and I have never had to. I have accepted their word and lifestyle and the surrounding testimony of the community I grew up in. It’s possible everyone around me is involved in a massive conspiracy, but this is not likely and not something worth considering.

That being said, if you wanted to offer evidence to the contrary, I would be open to it. I would be skeptical, but I have no reason to not listen at all. Note that that is something important. I would be very unlikely to change my mind, but if the evidence was good enough, I would.

I get concerned when I meet people who say that they are Christian and that they will never change their mind. Now I certainly hope that they don’t, but I don’t want you to be in it in such a way that if there was ever given absolutely evidence to the contrary that you would still say, “Nope. Not changing my mind.” As a devout Christian, I have no real concerns I will ever find such evidence, but I also know that I don’t know everything.

If that seems problematic to you, keep in mind that if you do evangelism, you are asking people to do just that. You are asking them to change their mind and whole worldview entirely based on the evidence that you present to them. Why should they need to be open but you don’t? Because your belief is true?  They think the exact same thing about their belief.

In debates today, such as issues like homosexuality and abortion, many who are more conservative are often called bigots. The idea implicitly is that this is a done debate and there’s really no need to listen to the other side. If that is what you think, then that is actually being utterly intolerant of a creed different from yours which makes you the bigot in that case.

Yesterday, I wrote about charges like homophobia. What was rightly said in a comment on my Facebook is that this is a way of just shutting down debate. That’s entirely correct. The problem is that means that you really don’t care to know if you’re wrong on an issue if you go that route. Now I have no problem if you think it’s highly unlikely that you are wrong. All that’s recommended is to listen to the other side.

If someone opposes XYZ, it’s good to always ask why they oppose it. It’s easy to say something like “Republicans just want to see poor people die!” or “Democrats just only want to spread sinfulness!” Now both of those could be true, but you don’t know someone’s reason for opposing something until you ask them. I saw someone share something today about Republicans voting against a certain act. I wanted to look and see why they did so and find it in their own words. Too many articles I wrote were on the other side saying “Republicans hate XYZ!” I kept looking and found reasons that on the surface at least left me thinking, “That makes sense.” If I wanted to argue they were right, I would want to look more, but I at least decided I should see what was said first.

Ultimately, if you think it highly unlike you are wrong, that’s one thing, and that’s fine, but still listen to see what your opponent has to say and if it’s something new and you consider it important to your thinking, look into it. If you are convinced that you cannot possibly be wrong, then you are just a dogmatist and essentially you’re holding to a religious creed of sorts. If I meet someone who does not think they can be wrong in anything, I wonder why I should think they are right in anything. Ironically, as was said about, such a person is truly a bigot.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

On Charges Like Homophobia

Does it really make a difference to say such claims? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Yesterday, I wrote about the failure of the movie Bros. One claim brought up by Billy Eichner who was behind the movie was that it failed because of homophobia. I could talk about just that claim today, but there are plenty of others.

Let’s go back in time and consider Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” quote. She had said that half of Trump supporters could be placed in this basket. How did she describe these people? “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”

The sad thing is sometimes, techniques like this work. People get scared because they don’t want to be labeled this way and seen this way. Nowadays, the same people that used to tell us about how totes awesome tolerance was, are the ones that will go scouring through someone’s Twitter history and seeing if just one time a decade ago they said something mildly offensive to ruin their lives.

For my part, when I hear the claim about racism, sexism, or even a counterpart such as white supremacist, I tend to disregard it immediately. Why? Because I have heard it so many times that I just can’t take it seriously. It has become a story of the boy who cried wolf.

Homophobia is a particularly odd one to me. Consider if I came up to you and said “So have you given any thought lately to having sex with your mother?” Now if you act repulsed at that, could I go and say “Oh! You must be an incestophobe!” (My spell check is saying that word is not real, but give it time.) Are we going to move soon from an age where we talk more about pedophobes than we do about pedophiles? (The former is a word that doesn’t exist yet in spell check, but I suspect it could be there within a decade.)

If anything, consider that you are accusing someone of having a phobia, which is a mental condition, and your reply is to make fun of them for it? Phobias are incredibly serious things when they are real that can severely limit someone’s life. Somehow, many more often on the left have chosen to use this term regularly.

Tolerance is no longer totes awesome.

Disagreement with a position doesn’t mean that you are afraid of it, unless we want to say every non-Christian is a Christophobe. If anything, you could have a positive attitude towards something and still choose to avoid it. Consider someone who is recovering from addiction. You can find plenty of people in an Alcoholics Anonymous group who somewhere would likely still love to have alcohol. They’re not alcoholphobes either. They just know it’s not good for them and they have to avoid it because the effects of it on them are not good.

Right now, looking at racism, I live in a city where it is very much a melting pot of various cultures. At many of the businesses around here, I am a minority. Does this cause me any trouble? Nope. I’m still a Christian and everyone around me is still in the image of God.

Another problem with the approach of crying something like racism or homophobe is that it really doesn’t require you actually listen to the other person. If you did not, for example, want Obama to be president, it is possible it could be because you are a racist, but it could also be because of other reasons, such as you didn’t like his policies and approach.

If someone is called a homophobe, it could be they find homosexuality disgusting, but it could also be that they have a view of the family that doesn’t allow for that. They think, and I agree, that a man-woman monogamous unit is the foundation of a society and raising up the next generation. Now someone like myself could be wrong on that, but just throwing out homophobe doesn’t allow us to even discuss the issue.

Every time something like this is said, what is no longer being discussed is the issue, but rather the person. For someone who receives this charge, defending yourself is not really the way to go, at least primarily. That distracts from the issue. What really needs to be discussed is the belief in question.

So for those of us who have heard this, the ideal goal is really to just not pay attention to this unless there’s serious evidence behind it. For those who do use this kind of claim, really try something better. You might be further convincing the choir, but you really just cause the rest of us to roll our eyes and not take you seriously.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

The Rush To Hate

Is the word used too easily? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Something I tire of in the world today is the quick rush to hate and the condemnation of hate. If there is disagreement against someone, it is assumed that the hatred of the person must be the cause. Accusations of moral turpitude are too easily thrown out there. (Hint to my leftist friends, and even enemies: I have heard the terms racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, bigot, etc. that nowadays I no longer take them seriously.)

Unfortunately for an age where we talk about unity and tolerance, immediately jumping to hate is not going to help us in discussions. How can you have an honest discussion with someone if you think they hate you? Now in all fairness, maybe they do, but shouldn’t that be checked on and not just assumed?

If all we are judging someone on is isolated actions without a context, we could be making really poor judgments. Suppose at my workplace I see a parent snap off to their child. Now i could be assuming that this person is a horrible parent and doesn’t really care about their child. I could be right. However, it could also be that they’ve had an extremely stressful time recently or gone through a personal crisis and their kid is just on their last nerve and they will regret the way they snapped at their kid later.

Here’s a good rule to consider. Always consider that it’s more likely that the other person’s motives are more pure than you think they are. Always also consider that your motives are less pure than you think they are.

Along those lines also, keep in mind good motives don’t always mean good actions and good results. It could be like the boy wanting to set the butterfly free without realizing his breaking the butterfly out is killing it. The butterfly needs to break free on its own so it will be strong enough to fly.

There are also people in fiction known as antiheroes who do good things, but do them for the wrong reasons. We just often don’t have enough information. That’s why accusations of moral turpitude are always serious.

Also, not all hate is bad. There are some things you ought to hate. Why is it that it’s not a good thing to be called a Nazi? Because you ought to hate Nazism. If you don’t hate Nazism, there’s something wrong with you. That doesn’t mean you will always feel hatred, and I hope you don’t, but you know who the bad guys are. At the same time, you shouldn’t hate Nazis. You should love them. You should love them so much you want them to see the error of their ways.

You should hate plenty of other things. You should hate sex trafficking. You should hate child abuse. You should hate rape. You should hate people unwillingly living in poverty. You should hate disease. The list could go on and on.

I also know conservatives do this as well. You won’t find me doing it. Hate is a word that describes something real, but I don’t use it as much as others do. I could on my own personal opinions of something, but I don’t generally express them.

Tomorrow, I plan on looking at an accusation of hate and see if it holds up.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Paul Behaving Badly

What do I think of Randy Richards’s and Brandon O’Brien’s book published by IVP? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Paul can be a very polarizing figure today. Some Christians have the idea that Jesus is really awesome (And they’re right), but we don’t know about that Paul guy. He wasn’t even one of the original twelve. He didn’t meet Jesus in person. Why should we listen to him? Some skeptics will claim that it was Paul who really invented Christianity and took the good message of Jesus and turned Him into a deity and lost sight of His message.

For those of us who do like Paul, we do have to admit there can be difficulties. As the authors ask “Was Paul a jerk?” Sometimes, it looks like he was. They bring this up in a number of areas. First, the general question of if he was a jerk. Then they ask if he was a killjoy, a racist, a supporter of slavery, a chauvinist, a homophobe, a hypocrite, and finally a twister of Scripture.

Each chapter starts with the charges against Paul and they do bring forward an excellent case. You can look at the claims and if you are not familiar with the debates it is easy to ask “How is Paul going to get out of this one?” The authors also grant that Paul is not one behaving according to 21st century Western standards, but he was still just as much behaving badly to his own culture as he was just as radical to them. Paul is kind of in an in-between spot sometimes. Many times he’ll push the envelope further and leave it to us to keep pushing it. The question is are we going to do that.

Many of these questions need to be addressed for the sake of many people you will encounter who raise these objections. (Why didn’t Paul just demand the immediate release of slaves?) I enjoyed particularly the chapter on Paul being a killjoy. O’Brien gives his story in this one on how anything wasn’t to be done because we are to abstain from the appearance of evil so let’s make sure we all go see only G-rated movies and are teetotallers. (While I personally abstain from alcoholic beverages, I don’t condemn those who drink and control their alcohol.)

Some insights I thought were interesting and added perspective. Why did Paul seem to take contradictory stances on meat offered to idols? Why did he have Timothy circumcised when Timothy was from the area of Galatia and Paul had made it clear that if you let yourself be circumcised, then you are denying the Gospel. (If you want the answers to those questions, you know what you need to do.)

I would have liked to have seen a little bit more on the honor and shame aspect of the culture of the time. There is some touching on this, such as talk also about the client/patron system, but a quick refresher would have been good for those who don’t know it. Of course, I definitely recommend that anyone pick up their excellent book Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes.

This book is a great blessing that we need today. Paul, like I said, is one of the most controversial figures even among Christians. To deal with his critics and to help those who would like to support him, you need to read this book.

In Christ,
Nick Peters