Journal: The bestowing of a name

This morning’s journal, like yesterday’s, had signs of mental exhaustion all over it.  I finished writing the novel (yay!), then worked on a freelance project that involved rewriting 40K of a 50K novel in less than a week.  So about 90K of writing in two weeks:  mental exhaustion.  I can tell because all I do in the journal entries is bitch and moan about things.  So take that into consideration.

I was thinking about someone who’d been ranting about how everyone who wasn’t Christian were “moral relativists,” and how their being intolerant of his views was complete hypocrisy on their part.

Like I said, bitching and moaning…

When you bestow a name and its “obvious” rules on someone else, you can’t be offended and shocked when people seem to behave hypocritically with regards to those rules–they were never the rules (or principles) that applied in the first place.  Humanists, secularists, atheists, agnostics, [probably a bunch of other groups I’m not naming, not limited to people who aren’t Christian but who are religious after other faiths,] and just plain “don’t care”-ists don’t go walking around saying, “I am a moral relativist.”  That’s a specialist term from philosophy.  […]

If you’re going to lump everyone who isn’t “you” into a group called “moral relativist,” then you’re really just setting up a “them.”  And of course you’re going to be on the looking for things “they” are doing wrong or hypocritically.  And of course it’s going to start looking like “they” are evil.  So–practically speaking–[calling someone a] moral relativist is, or rather belongs to, the process by which one turns other people into evil.  Calling someone a name they don’t apply to themselves is terrible.  I dunno about evil [in and of itself], but definitely a dick move.

I’ve gotten to the point where I hate responding negatively to other people’s comments on Facebook.  If you want to bring some b.s. to one of my posts, I’ll feel free to say what I like–it’s my party and I’ll say what I want to.  But the original comment still rankled, after a stupid amount of time.  It was probably a good thing to just spit out my opinion, even if it was totally l’esprit d’escalier by this point.

If you enjoyed today’s blog post, check out the stories in my Smoke historical mystery series, in which the small eke a leg up over the big.  Sometimes.  If they’re lucky.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *