"Us and Them"

“Us and Them”
The need to vent is apparent.
Exclusive language must be done away with. It is prejudicial and harmful in many ways. Prejudice does not become alive until it is played out in discrimination. (Definitions taken from my Sociology class).

1. Prejudice
=pre-judgment. A rigid and irrational generalization about an entire category of people. All people are like this, etc….based on an identity marker that they carry. They tend to be rigid, and over-simplified (These are Very hard to change. We assume that whatever we say about that person is natural and biological).

Discrimination is:
=treating various categories of people unequally.

Those of you who use elitist definitions are making many of us tired. Be careful of the language you use. "We"= us Christians, "Them"= secular or “None Christian”.

Warning: This terminology hurts and perpetuates systems of judgement and discrimination. You cannot see people’s hearts, so how dare you make judgements regarding what people believe. The Transcendent Reality looks at the heart, NOT you. Focus on your own actions, yes call one-another out in love BUT be careful of you jargon.

Secularism: Something void of "faith”. First of all what is faith? Can one person be void of it? NO all of us have faith of some-kind, but be careful how quickly you presume to think that your idea of “FAITH” trumps another.

As long as we hold these perspectives we create chasms between the world and us. It is the same in gender relations: Men and women are only 2% different. We have two different organs, that is all. WE both have brains, eyes, hair, skin, a heart a stomach, the ability to rationalize and make this world a better place. Yet we are so ademate about our differences. Why can't we shift our focus?

We are all existentially separated from each other; we live in a fallen world. YET by using exclusive language we simply make this existential separation much larger. By separating ourselves from the “secular” world around us by assuming that our perspective is greater is harmful.

Stop it. Why can’t we walk in humility? To even partake in the concept of secular is to think somehow that God is void the rest of culture apart from what Christians bring to it! Reductionism. The Transcendent Reality shows himself too many others in many different ways, and to assume that I have the WAY is already to under-mine what the Transcendent Reality is doing in another.

Can we learn from each other? Can we walk in humility? Admitting that maybe we don’t have this world of chaos and anomie completely figured out?

Our arrogance is not only separating us further from those whom we are suppose to love, but it is also loosing those who are within the system.

The reason I am venting about this is because I just finished a book report which claimed that Christians need to critical and practice discrimination against the secular world. I think all humans need to be critical, why the hell just Christians? Our society perpetuates ideas that are harmful to all humans (for example: sexually explicit material and violence). Our society advocates scripts upon the genders, ages, races, that perpetually harm one-another. All humans should be aware of this. And to think for one moment that Christians are the only ones who see this harm, and somehow have the lenses that allow them to step outside of culture is highly naive. The church is just as much entrenched in culture as the rest of us are.

WE can never completely be void of the ideas that are maintained in our culture, even within the church. Of course the church can be an instrument of change, but to think in a conformist way is dangerous. There are many systems of change that have taken part outside of the church, which have benefited society greatly. Be cautious how readily we think we have the way. Walk humbly with your meta-narrative and be open to dialogue with those who see the world through a different lens. We may learn something from one-another.

Your exclusivity hurts others
So be cautious of it.

Kim