Temporal Convection

The word hate should be banned from intellectual discussion because it has been overused to extinction. The definition of the word, according to the dictionary, is intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury. Now, I highly doubt that most people reading this article feel intense hostility and aversion toward anything. There are very few groups that can be said to honestly hate another group.

Lawmakers misunderstand the word, as well. "Hate crimes" are those crimes in which the criminal afflicted some victim because he felt some loathing toward the victim's social group. This is fine. Attacking a gay man or lynching a black man is certainly a display of intense hostility. Many of these people also show aversion to the victim's group or habits, although whether they feel this way out of fear, anger, or sense of injury is questionable.

Hate speech, on the other hand, is speech which is designed to negatively change other peoples' opinions about a certain group in one of those protected classes - race, sexuality, gender, etc. For instance, a pastor reading to his congregation from a certain verse in Leviticus (or maybe one in Romans) may be guilty of hate speech under the laws of some countries. But does this pastor honestly hate homosexuals? Does he feel aversion or intense hostility toward their actions? Does he fear them? Is he angry with them? Does he think they're attacking him? While some pastors (Fred Phelps) may feel some enmity toward homosexuality, I would imagine that the vast majority look on it with a sort of pity. Your opinion on the correctness of pitying gays is certainly permissible, whatever it may be. This viewpoint, however, is not hate and so should not be discussed as though it is.

Furthermore, using hate instead of disagree with or dislike is a reprehensible straw man. Certainly, it's wrong to hate things - it is not wrong to disagree with them or feel they are morally wrong. Incidentally, hate is not the opposite of love. That would be indifference.

This word, short for fundamentalist, and largely used only on the Internet, is another word that should be retired for ambiguity. What is a fundie? From the discussions in which I've participated, a fundie appears to be any Christian or member of an organized religion who disagrees with American liberalism.

But what is a fundamentalist? Fundamentalism (capital F), like all other movements, has gone through evolution over time. It began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States (surprise!). Fundamentalists hold five beliefs that are, well, fundamental to Christianity: inerrancy of the Scriptures, the virgin birth and deity of Jesus, the doctrine of atonement by Jesus's death, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the authenticity of Jesus's miracles. In other words, the basic doctrine of Fundamentalism sounds a whole lot like the Nicene Creed. (The Nicene Creed, incidentally, was the actual output of the Council at Nicea, not the Bible.)

Over the years, Fundamentalists have disagreed on a wide variety of topics and the group split up into separate entities, all of which deny any historical links with the early Fundamentalist movement. The current group of fundamentalists is largely identified by their refusal to cooperate with other Christian groups. They also have a tendency toward legalism - the designation of spiritually neutral things (such as styles of dress) as sacred or required for recognition as a Christian. Thus, to a fundamentalist, a Christian who wears a halter top shirt needs correction.

Basically, there are a very limited number of fundamentalists in the United States today, and most of them are not very active in politics. A person you accuse of being a fundamentalist is far more likely to be an evangelical. (Google finds approximately twice as many search results for "evangelical" as "fundamentalist".)

So, this word should be banned because its use pollutes intelligent dialogue with insults and guilt by association.

After the September 11th terrorist attacks, President Bush used the phrase "religion of peace" to describe Islam. Pundits have since developed a series of designations to describe each religion. For instance, Christianity is often described as the religion of love. Many religions describe themselves as the religion of hope, including Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism, Sufism, etc.

No religion can be called the religion of something, because no religion is about just one thing. Christianity, like many other religions, has ideals of love, mercy, faith, justice, charity, peace, compassion, reconciliation, forgiveness, repentance, humility, worship, and hope. It talks of both God's wrath toward humanity and his love toward his children. The Bible has some 1189 chapters, written over some 1200 years. It is amazing that the message is as consistent as it turned out, but it certainly cannot be whittled down to faith, love, or humility. (If we are forced to reduce it to one message, I would argue for repentance.)

In other words, when you use this phrase or make the assumption that any religion can be reduced to a single theme, you are wrong.

# posted by Dev @ 7:38 PM