I believe #6:
This post is coming from quite a heated disagreement I had with someone on facebook. She was a secretary at my high school, and I thought she was a pretty neat lady. That was, until this conversation.
She likes to post controversial posts about negative aspects of religion. Now, to her credit, she does so with all religions, not just Christianity. However, since that was the religion she was raised in, I feel from the posts I see that she holds a lot of resentment towards Christianity as a whole. At least that's what comes across in the things she posts.
I try to stay away from these posts, but there was one that caught my eye. It was about purity balls, which consequently I had never heard about. I read the article and looked that the so called "creepy" pictures they had collected from them. I became enraged. Though I never went through a purity ball, and let's add that I'm not naive in ANY way shape for form, I still think they are a beautiful thing that a daughter can go through with her dad and family.
So as not to steer too far off point, to sum up, after commenting that I didn't think they were creepy, and that people will find fault in anything they disagree with, comments that came back from that made me feel personally attacked for not only defending the balls, but defending the opinions of the families in the video that got shared in another comment. It was like a dateline report on them, with interviews of the girls and their families, where they explained what the balls were. It actually made them seem MORE acceptable to me, not less. The lady who posted that video was hoping for the opposite reaction from me, which stemmed an even bigger argument.
Here's my point: no matter how much I tried to show these commenters that this was a relatively innocent and simple ceremony, that it was about love and protection and not about control or domination, they refused to even try to understand. I have been accused by some of her other atheist friends, on more than one occasion, of being "closed minded" and "un-accepting"...and "crazy", but that's a different point. I was being accused of the exact thing they were doing to me.
Just because I am refusing to concede, because I am refusing to change my thinking and renounce my faith, that makes me closed minded? Because all I got were put downs and mockery from these people, I felt attacked and stood my ground. I stood firmly on my solid foundation of faith, and was then passively put down by being told that (to para-phrase) hopefully one day I would not need a Bible verse to tell me everything to do in my life...I doesn't matter how much you calmly explain, how much you defend, how many positive examples you give. If someone wants to see the negative, they will refuse to see the positive. Most of the time I was willing to listen and see their side of things, I was not given the same courtesy, because I am a Christian and I have just been brain washed into thinking these things.
To say such a thing to me is to question my intelligence, which is beyond highly offensive. To think that someone told me, so I blindly follow is absurd. I did not just let someone mold me into a minion of faith. I CHOSE to be a follower of Christ. It was a conscious decision that I made with my free thinking brain. To call me less intelligent, less of a woman, less of an anything because of my religion, to me, is the same as telling a black person that they couldn't possibly ____________ because they are black. Outrageous, right? I CAN do___________ even though I am a Christian. Why must we base everything we think about each other on something we can judge and ridicule? Why can't we just LOVE people for who they are and for where they are at in their walk of life? Why must we decide people are wrong for whatever reason? Can't we just accept people and be happy? Thus is the human condition...we suck.
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