Several times in the last few days, perusing facebook, I (Orin) have found myself thinking, “Don’t feed the bears!” And I did in fact type that once in a thread, one revolving around the horrendous treatment of a person by, nominally, people of faith, all in the name of preserving that same faith’s morals and doctrine. (I won’t go into that situation here, but anyone who is connected to me on Facebook has either already seen it or can easily find it.)
“Don’t feed the bears.”
It’s a sign that one might see at a zoo or a national park. Why is it there? Well, a couple obvious answers: 1) someone probably already has tried to feed the bears, and 2) that turned out to be a bad idea. Perhaps it was a bad idea for the safety of the person who thought it was a good idea. Or perhaps it’s one way or another bad for the bears, like, bad for their health for instance.
When I have been thinking (or typing) “don’t feed the bears” lately, the bears in this instance have been the previously mentioned nominally-Christian folks who post things online which defend doctrine and morals of the faith but at the expense of attacking the dignity of another human. Some of these bears are websites and/or facebook pages, and some of these bears are the people who “buy in” to what is posted by these sites, and use that rhetoric to fuel their supposedly righteous anger in a way that, to them, allows the ends to justify the means, apparently.
Our faith is a treasury of teachings which must be studied, learned, and applied to our daily living all the time. One of those first teachings, scripturally, is how all humanity was (and is) created in the image and likeness of God. We hold a dignity because of that, yet there are some who would attack it and deny that dignity in the name of nearly anything else, and sometimes in the name of very little.
It is these bears who need not be fed: it is dangerous to those who feed them, because the bear might someday, at any point, choose to attack the feeder. And it’s dangerous for the rest of us, because who needs a larger and stronger bear wreaking havoc in the neighborhood? Most of all, it’s dangerous to the bear itself, who has lost track of the core of Christ’s teachings: love, mercy, and relationship.
If one disagrees with a person’s stance on an issue, or their way of living their lives, the answer is never to devalue that person – that’s what is sometimes called an ad hominem attack, attacking the person rather than their argument. Our creation and our savior have elevated us to more than that, to be better than that.
Don’t feed the bears. It’s not good for anyone.