I read this article recently, it's being doing the rounds on some of my friends Facebook pages. I'm impressed. It takes a huge amount of courage and strength of character to be able to face people who are potential threats to you so I very much applaud Mr Davis for his achievement.
Reading the article made me think of my own recent internal argument relating to this subject....I admit that I have been a little disturbed of late by a number of posts I've seen shared by friends which are either a little questionable, or in some cases, outright offensive. I'm not going to share any of them here as I don't wish to add to their distribution. Just to clarify, they are mostly posts which scream of religious intolerance and general misunderstanding of the subject they speak of.
I've been in two minds on many occasions to instantly remove those posters from my friends list. The internal argument goes something like this:
Voice 1: "do it! you don't want to be associated with people who actually think like that! Anyone who would share that is a bigoted ass hole."
Voice 2: "but they're your friend, you've know them for "X" years and you know that they don't actually have that opinion. Maybe they're being sarcastic or missing the point."
Voice 1: "or maybe they've changed...you haven't seen them for a while, friends drift and people's opinions can be influenced. Maybe they are that person now."
Voice 3: "but I don't actually know. Jumping to conclusions in either direction may make me the exact person that I'm condemning. I need to think on this more."
I know I said two minds, but there's always a little voice of reason in there!
(P.S. I'm not actually crazy...I have been tested ;) )
I did challenge someone on a post lately...I pointed out the inconsistencies and errors, and the response I got was confusing. The person responsible for the post replied saying that they agreed with me and that they wanted to understand more about why people wanted to do such bad things and "ruin our country". I know that not everyone has a pre-determined level of common sense, but surely, if you want to understand something (in this case it was Islamic beliefs) then the way to do that is to ask questions, or read and learn for yourself...not post intolerant garbage on Facebook.
Is it me who's missing the point?
My internal argument therefore rages on...the myriad of voices bickering over whether or not to hit that de-friend button...I guess that in some ways actually writing this post may solve that problem for me....I'll let you now if my friend count inexplicably goes down once this is published!
Reading the article made me think of my own recent internal argument relating to this subject....I admit that I have been a little disturbed of late by a number of posts I've seen shared by friends which are either a little questionable, or in some cases, outright offensive. I'm not going to share any of them here as I don't wish to add to their distribution. Just to clarify, they are mostly posts which scream of religious intolerance and general misunderstanding of the subject they speak of.
I've been in two minds on many occasions to instantly remove those posters from my friends list. The internal argument goes something like this:
Voice 1: "do it! you don't want to be associated with people who actually think like that! Anyone who would share that is a bigoted ass hole."
Voice 2: "but they're your friend, you've know them for "X" years and you know that they don't actually have that opinion. Maybe they're being sarcastic or missing the point."
Voice 1: "or maybe they've changed...you haven't seen them for a while, friends drift and people's opinions can be influenced. Maybe they are that person now."
Voice 3: "but I don't actually know. Jumping to conclusions in either direction may make me the exact person that I'm condemning. I need to think on this more."
I know I said two minds, but there's always a little voice of reason in there!
(P.S. I'm not actually crazy...I have been tested ;) )
I did challenge someone on a post lately...I pointed out the inconsistencies and errors, and the response I got was confusing. The person responsible for the post replied saying that they agreed with me and that they wanted to understand more about why people wanted to do such bad things and "ruin our country". I know that not everyone has a pre-determined level of common sense, but surely, if you want to understand something (in this case it was Islamic beliefs) then the way to do that is to ask questions, or read and learn for yourself...not post intolerant garbage on Facebook.
Is it me who's missing the point?
My internal argument therefore rages on...the myriad of voices bickering over whether or not to hit that de-friend button...I guess that in some ways actually writing this post may solve that problem for me....I'll let you now if my friend count inexplicably goes down once this is published!
