A plea for charity

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Contrary to the reputation that’s been carefully cultivated for me in some circles over the past decade or two, I’ve never favored nor enjoyed no-holds-barred internet fisticuffs.  Nor have I ever supported personal attacks.

People who really know me, I think, will have no problem believing that, in fact, I’m very far from the image of the mean-spirited attack dog that some cherish of me.

I do believe that frank disagreement and honest argument are necessary on occasion.  However, I don’t attack other faiths — I have a long record precisely to the contrary, in many scores of columns for the Deseret News, in books and articles and public lectures, in my classroom teaching, in my establishment of Brigham Young University’s Islamic Translation Series and Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, in my involvement with the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, in outreach efforts over decades on five continents — but I also believe that I have a responsibility to advocate my beliefs and to defend my own faith against attacks on it.  And I will do so.

If others refrain from attacking my beliefs, I’ll happily spend most of my time and effort in positively advocating those beliefs.  But I won’t back down if they’re assaulted.

Still, even then, my focus is not, and never has been, on the personalities of others.

Unfortunately, contemporary discourse — particularly online — all too often goes immediately for the jugular, for the polemics of personal destruction.  I myself receive anonymous hate mail virtually every day and, not infrequently, multiple times daily.  And I’ve been receiving such hate mail for years now.

So I just want to post an appeal.  It seems especially appropriate to the Christmas season, though we shouldn’t require the holidays to remind us to be kind:

When you’re disposed to attack somebody who’s a more or less public figure, please remember that even public figures have private lives.  They’re people.  They have families.  They have feelings, worries, concerns.  They may be going through tough times.  They may well be suffering “sorrow that the eye can’t see.”  And the odds are reasonably strong that they’re trying to be decent people, and to do good.

When you feel like letting a blogger have it, or writing an insulting letter to a newspaper columnist, please take a deep breath before you press “Send.”

So much public discourse today, online and elsewhere, is almost unbelievably crass, coarse, cruel, defamatory, and uncharitable.

I have a longtime acquaintance who writes on religious issues for a major daily newspaper here in Utah.  She tells me that she simply can’t bring herself to look at reader comments on her articles anymore, because, so often, they’re so horribly unpleasant.  And I know exactly what she means.  I sometimes wonder what people are like in daily life who can be so consistently callous and nasty in public forums.  I don’t understand them, and I hope I never will.

Not very eloquent, these thoughts.  Not well organized.  Not deep.  But deeply felt.