Birch on Humanizing Others

Arminian William Birch advocates humanizing those with whom we might morally disagree:

My amateur opinion is that people like Omar [the Muslim mass shooter of a homosexual nightclub] maintain the cognitive distortion of objectifying people. He viewed LGBTQ people as mere objects of his disgust and hatred. They are not, in his mind, people of inestimable value and dignity as image-bearers of God. They are “things” of a vile nature that deserve to be eradicated, much like some loathed insect, or disease. This is the same sort of objectification maintained by the Nazis against the Jewish people. This is the same sort of demeaning and devaluing of the human nature of Armenians by the Ottomans in the early twentieth century. Indeed, we even see traces of this horrible state of mind when men objectify women, and women objectify men for sensual and sexual pleasure. We need a mass ontological-perceptual reformation — viewing human beings as does God, as image-bearers of the Divine.

2 comments

  1. I think it’s a little more complicated than that. Especially with the recent discovery that Omar himself was a homosexual. In fact he didn’t just shoot up some random gay night club. He shot up his own gay night club. The club that he himself was a regular at for over three years. So he didn’t kill a bunch of people that he thought was lower than him. He hated himself and shot at a bunch of people that represented his own wickedness in his mind.

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