The good folks at Libs of TicTok note an interesting double standard when it comes to “hate”.
Now given that I’m a very Catholic guy, who reads scripture regularly (a minimum of 21 chapters and seven Psalms a week) you might think this would bother me.
But other than the double standard, which at worst annoys and which I’ll note, it doesn’t really bother me. Let’s list the reasons why it doesn’t bother me in order of unimportance:
- I don’t know if they’re actual Catholic Bibles
- None of this does anything to my faith or anyone else’s
- As long as the person is alive it’s their soul to play with and or throw away
- You never know what God has in store for such a guy, If there was such a thing as the Bible on the day Saul left for Damascus he might have cheered burning them too.
- Such an act self identifies someone that I need to pray for thus generating needed prayer
- If those bibles belonged to the person who burned them it’s none of my business unless I lived in the town and was delayed by a fire illegally set at an intersection
In a republic reason one is the key one. I don’t believe in hate crimes. If a person chooses to hate their neighbor that’s on them people have the right to their own opinions even nasty ones. As long as those actions don’t harm anyone and involve their own property it’s not my business. In fact if they had not left this in the middle of an intersection blocking it I don’t think it would be newsworthy at all.
Now if they sheriff decides to cite this guy for blocking an intersection and reckless endangerment (fire at a public intersection) I’m all for it but those are the crimes involved period.
If some guy wants to buy bibles and burn them, it’s on them. Now if someone decides to try to take one of MY bibles or someone else’s Bible, Catholic or no, and destroys it, THEN we have a problem that needs to be acted on. That’s theft and vandalism.
But I’m not going to be provoked by idiots being idiots who are only harming themselves to anything other than prayer.
That’s how Christianity works.