Telling a random person of unknown religious affiliation that something is "how God intended" is rude, but very few people respect that boundary these days, and it's more noticeable when someone *does* respect it. It's kind of like rude is the baseline and the few who show respect are the ones who tend to stand out as favorable. I wish the situation was better.
Telling a person who is known to be openly pagan that something is "how God intended" is several orders of magnitude more offensive, because that is a deliberate challenge in the form of a social dominance game. That's far more rare, thankfully, but when it happens, it's kind of like being shot at .. sort of a "What the fuck did you just do?" moment. (People who don't follow openly non-Christian religious traditions have a really hard time understanding this from a personal perspective, so this, too, happens way more often than it should.)
So, if he didn't know you're openly pagan, it's possible he might respond to some patient and calm constructive criticism on this, and maybe he'll be a bit more inclined to respect that boundary with others. If he did know, and did it anyway, I doubt even a violent response would shake him up enough to get him to clue into the fact that that's a hard boundary he shouldn't cross.
(And for what it's worth, most openly pagan folks I know don't go far enough in establishing and respecting that boundary, and tend to go into flight/conflict-avoidance mode even when someone steps way over the line. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who doesn't respect the rule of "your rights end where mine begin and vice versa" needs to be called on it, every time they cross that line, until they learn. Some never will, but enough might respond to that that it's worth making into a rule ..)
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rosecarmine
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-09 03:20 pm (UTC)Telling a random person of unknown religious affiliation that something is "how God intended" is rude, but very few people respect that boundary these days, and it's more noticeable when someone *does* respect it. It's kind of like rude is the baseline and the few who show respect are the ones who tend to stand out as favorable. I wish the situation was better.
Telling a person who is known to be openly pagan that something is "how God intended" is several orders of magnitude more offensive, because that is a deliberate challenge in the form of a social dominance game. That's far more rare, thankfully, but when it happens, it's kind of like being shot at .. sort of a "What the fuck did you just do?" moment. (People who don't follow openly non-Christian religious traditions have a really hard time understanding this from a personal perspective, so this, too, happens way more often than it should.)
So, if he didn't know you're openly pagan, it's possible he might respond to some patient and calm constructive criticism on this, and maybe he'll be a bit more inclined to respect that boundary with others. If he did know, and did it anyway, I doubt even a violent response would shake him up enough to get him to clue into the fact that that's a hard boundary he shouldn't cross.
(And for what it's worth, most openly pagan folks I know don't go far enough in establishing and respecting that boundary, and tend to go into flight/conflict-avoidance mode even when someone steps way over the line. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who doesn't respect the rule of "your rights end where mine begin and vice versa" needs to be called on it, every time they cross that line, until they learn. Some never will, but enough might respond to that that it's worth making into a rule ..)