Timing and Poor Taste

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While I try hard to stay away from controversy in social media these days, yesterday I stepped in it again. A friend re-tweeted a post naming the 21 Christians beheaded by ISIS. I'd not yet seen the headlines for the day, although to be honest it probably wouldn't have altered my response much anyway. I simply commented that, in fact, many more Muslims have been killed by ISIS than have Christians or any other minority group. As a Christian, it bothers me that we mainly seem concerned about terrorism when it impacts our own (i.e., that whole tribalistic mindset). I provided a link to an article substantiating the factual nature of my claim.

At any rate, my comment went over like a lead balloon. I was basically told that my comment was in poor taste, at least in part due to the timing. But what better timing to point out a problem in popular perception than when such an event happens? I'm not in the least trivializing the horror of yesterday's news, but I wanted to draw attention to the fact that these are only the latest victims in a long list of murdered people. And I don't think we should be more concerned about the death of members of one group than of another.

This isn't the first time I've been told my timing was poor. I don't see what timing really has to do with truth. Has anyone else run into similar conflicts when addressing tragedy?

Did you mention in your Twitter comment that you are effected by the horrific nature of their deaths? If not, you may have appeared cold to it. Your points are valid, but may have been inappropriate if the tweet was more about the brutality than religion.

No, I didn't qualify my reply, partly because that much seemed obvious and also due to the character limitations imposed by Twitter. I figured my intention - to highlight the equal atrocities of killing Muslims and Christians - was clear, since I was reminding the person that Christias weren't the only people being victimized by ISIS.

When given enough time and space to do so, I'd normally try to lay a little more verbal groundwork, but in the space permitted my intention was clear to me, at any rate.

I do not see what was wrong with your timing or anything you said....in fact the timing couldn't have been better in my opinion. It seems a lot of christians have to be 'a victim' of persecution, so they take something like what you speak of and then sway it to make it about them and Christians in general so they can then feel great about themselves having 'faith' in the face of persecution that the bible promises them they'll face....basically they create persecution towards them when not appropriate to feel like brave soldiers of god or some stupid crap. ISIS kills all kinds of people, anyone who doesn't agree with their extremism or that they decide they don't like....they aren't going out of their way to specifically persecute Christians....if anything it was bad timing for them to try and make it look like its about christians and how they're so persecuted, which kind of overlooks the bigger picture. Why only name the 'Christians' they have beheaded or otherwise executed when they hardly limit it to Christians.

Why do I say this...I was a christian and that is one of the big things that really pissed me off about other christians and going to church, was how they tried to skew things like that to be about christians and the terrible persecution we face for our 'faith' in god and how we have to 'defend' our faith against it.....I mean come on, talk about inducing paranoia and a weird sense of entitlement to abuses in the world.

They made it about religion when they decided it was only important to mention the 'christians' killed in that list. I mean if on next 9-11 I posted a memorial kind of list of names of people killed in that attack, but then decided only to include names of people of a certain faith/belief system...I am sure people might point they weren't the only ones killed.

That said I honestly am not all that deeply effected by deaths of people I've never seen like on a personal level...but of course the brutal ways in which they've been killing, and the extremism certainly disturbs me as well as the deaths, but they don't effect me like it would if say my dad or my brother was killed or someone else close to me.

I'm not a Christian or a Muslim. Too me it doesn't really matter. These people are defined more by their brutality than their religion.

I guess there is nothing new about brutality either. Being able to see these acts on video spotlights them. And ISIS seems adept at doing this.

It's best if I'm not available for comment when there's been an atrocity committed. I tend to see what most people say as too obvious to bother repeating, and the only thing that remains is to throw a different light onto the situation, which isn't usually wanted. I also notice that they aren't being very objective, so I'm tempted to point that out, which isn't wanted either. They inappropriately try to read between the lines of what I'm saying, they assume, just because I observe a fact that seems to mitigate the killer's blame to some extent, that I approve of the atrocity.

But it's not supposed to be an intelligent discussion, or to discover anything through openmindedness. It's an emotional, group thing that's going on, they're reassuring each other of something.

QFT

I don't think you said anything wrong or in poor taste - just something unpopular. For me saying unpopular things is one of my raison d'etre.