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A few months ago, I was deleted by someone on Facebook for making a joke about Christianity that they found in bad taste. It turns out that this had also been fuelled by the fact that I had earlier poured withering scorn on their belief that we should forgive unrepentant rapists and because I had called them sexist and homophobic (which I still believe is true for various reasons, the latest being that they referred to LGBT in their last blogpost as “politically correct lingo”). My subsequent attempts to reconcile with them privately failed miserably, as they sent me increasingly bizarre messages that included mocking me for having a mental breakdown last summer and a lengthy explanation about how they had only started sending me abusive messages only when they considered that our relationship was doomed and that’s why it was justified. I’ve never found “Thou may abuse ex-friends and strangers” in the Bible, at any rate.
I found the hypocrisy of someone sending me messages telling me that I am unconscionably rude and arrogant and then signing them, “Your better” breath-taking. I still find it reasonably incredible that someone can call for a Christian attitude towards men who commit violence against women and then apparently fail to demonstrate it themselves to people who offended them. To this end, I wrote a blogpost on the matter entitled, “A Joke to Delete For? Religious Humour and Hypocrisy on Facebook”. I took it down after a lot of criticism for apparently attacking religious people and because the person involved claimed I was back-biting.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the comments that I received. They ranged from suggesting that I should never have posted the joke at all in order to offending someone’s sensibilities, to the fact that my post was largely intended to publicly proclaim someone to be a hypocrite.
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