Siting this post by American Elephant
The key to take away is this paragraph
“And THAT is what this outrage is all about: a tolerant Christian who believes I am a sinner, like he is, but loves & tolerates me nonetheless, vs INTOLERANT leftists who want to permanently silence anyone who disagrees with their world view.”
I would take it a step further. It isn’t that they want to silence those who don’t share their world view, it is that they have no interest in establishing common language and understanding of conflicting world views.
When Christians for instance identify sins and proclaim them publicly many take this as public judgement against the sinner. For some Christians this may be the case, but for the vast vast majority that I have met it isn’t at all. This is conflict faces all Christians in a great capacity. It is the largest stumbling block in proselytizing as loving words often fall on the deaf ears.
Yet these deaf ears do not have to exist. Christians in the modern world have been losing the battle of conversation because they haven’t been laying the groundwork to establish a common understanding or common language when it comes to sin.
Phil Robertson is facing blow back not because he believes homosexuality is a sin, but rather because instead of defining sin well, he defined a group of sins and those together seem quite offensive. A better approach would have been to say
A sin is a human action that severs our relationship with God. There are perhaps two categories of sins those which completely sever our relationship and those that simply bruise it. Both cases can be overcome through Christian faith. Sin is a constant struggle we are born into it, even the nicest kindest person is plagued with their own sins that they must overcome. This doesn’t mean they are a bad person, by the Christian definition a sinner is a good person as sin in it’s simplest definition is neither good nor evil.
There are of course evil sins: murder being the easiest to identify, but there are good sins as well. For instance Charitable work in the name of a false God may do a lot of good for society, helping people in the name of Government not in the name of God is a good thing it isn’t evil, but it is a Sin by definition.
This language that Christians intuitively understand is taken for granted when it comes to dealing with the secular world. Sadly both the secular and the Christian suffer for this shortcoming. It is time for real conversation regarding our understandings of each other. Without this conversation we are sadly both talking to brick walls.
