Reply #51: The Folly of Labels [View All]

[Dogmudgeon]

Labels have their uses, but in the case of "defining" what people believe and hold dear, they utterly fail. And when it comes to people whose faith is little more than an artifice for their destructiveness, it's counterproductive, because it elevates them a position of leadership of a faith (or any other group) that may reject their behavior. This entire thread is based on a single, and flawed, idea: That we need a short, simple, pithy, universally-understood and all-inclusive word for effective name-calling.

We don't.

Many of us have struggled with this for years. We want a neutron bomb for moral warfare, the perfect label that accurately identifies the ratbastards but leaves the earthly saints off the hook. This approach has never worked before, and it won't work now. Bad folks exist in all social movements, and exert tremendous power in many of them. Yet even modern Fundamentalism-Evangelicism was once the largest progressive religious movement in America, and that branch of it still exists. One hundred years from now, it may be Quakers' leaders hands holding the whip, and the 15th or 16th or 17th Dalai Lama may be reviled by people of good will. Those examples may be difficult to conceive of, or may even be repugnant to consider, but it's worth keeping in mind that no faith, no group is immune to the influence of repugnant people and ideas. The Quakers, as a whole, have had a long history of social conscience; and the last two Dalai Lamas have been strongly progressive, but, as I've noted, so was the American Protestant Fundamentalist-Evangelical Christian movement that has lately degenerated into a moral ghetto run by unprincipled tribal bosses like Pat Robertson, Rousas Rushdooney, and Jerry Falwell.

It's useless to try to find a proper epithet for them -- we ought to stick to ad hoc labels, if we must use them at all. Far better to "cut them out" rhetorically and show how they're beyond the pale of spirituality, society, good sense, and human conduct, rather than to cut them a larger territory than they have already grabbed for themselves. Calling them "Christians" or "Christo-Fascists" or anything else gives them a legitimacy they don't deserve, and it incorrectly (and unfairly) stains the Christians who do not practice hatred. (The same thing likewise holds in non-Christian contexts.)

"Bad People" really need no label, and their predations do not deserve our respect. To paraphrase a certain popular Jewish philosopher, "you shall know them by their stench." The most truthful label of all may simply be the sense of nausea they create.

--p!