When Christians Attack
Over the weekend, I had a little problem with a particular Christian. A few weeks ago, a Christian e-mailed me asking for a collaborative project where we each ask each other 5 questions on our Examiner pages and then we each answer them. The way it was pitched to me, we would refrain from personal attacks and just concentrate on the topic.
What tends to happen a lot with Christians is that as soon as someone criticizes their religious beliefs (the whole point of the collaboration) they take it as a personal attack and then they feel that the gloves are off and they can personally attack back. This was the case this weekend.
I admit that I viciously attacked Christianity as a belief system but I made sure to not only refrain from personal attacks, but I also told my readers to do the same. The Christian Examiner in question, responded by writing an entire article ignoring the questions I asked and focusing on me personally. One of his popular techniques was to make up whole conversations and attack my name to them. When I called him out on it, he changed the article slightly but the substance did not change.
Instead of saying that I said things that I didn’t say, he said that he imaged that I would say things that I would never say and then criticized me for saying them (which I didn’t actually say). He didn’t understand why I would be pissed that wrote a whole article which just attacked me personally rather than address the actual issues. He didn’t understand that making up conversations and attacking my name to them is not a friendly way to debate an issue. He didn’t understand the difference between viciously criticizing a belief and viciously attacking a person.
The thing is that he started this whole collaboration in a friendly, passive manner and then turned around and wrote a not so friendly, aggressive, personal attack. When I called him out on it, he fell back on his false piety. I wish I could say that this was the first time I had a collaboration with a Christian that went this way, but it isn’t. It seems that this type of thing happens a lot and not just to me. I wonder if it is something they teach in Sunday School.
Related articles
- The Taboos of Criticizing Religion (dangeroustalk.net)
Filed under: Alternative Worldview, anti-intellectualism, Coexist, conversation, debate, Personal, Religion