Last night Ballista from the society of Phineas made this comment, and it is a good place to start.

We need to go hard or go home when it comes to true faith. This goes for ourselves as well as others. Like a preacher once talked about “push the gas pedal on”, I was thinking “why don’t we try to push it down through the floor boards”. The problem is that no one really takes anything seriously, and I think that comes out through the common misinterpretation of that passage

Now, he is correct. We need to take our faith seriously, and ignore the fascist trolls in the church, who demand that we stick to some kind of impossible level of holiness. We have enough problems with our own sins. If we try to change, we fail. We sin, and we err. But this is life. This world is fallen. And no enemy or hostile philosophy should be allowed to dent our faith, particularly with their own set of contradictory standards.

Colossians 2:8-23

⁸See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. ⁹For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, ¹⁰and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. ¹¹In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; ¹²when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. ¹³And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, ¹⁴erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.

¹⁶Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. ¹⁷These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. ¹⁸Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, ¹⁹and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.

²⁰If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations, ²¹“Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch”? ²²All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings. ²³These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.

Now, what are the things we need to be cautious of? Matt Forney has an excellent post (in which he outs a troll who specialises in interrupting meetings from Men’s Rights Activists and the Right). He notes…

There’s nothing that infuriates leftists more than when their enemies use their own tactics against them. Feminists, anti-racists and other rabbit people operate on the assumption that their opponents will follow rules that they themselves are free to ignore. It’s why being a “hypocrite” is the worst sin you can commit in their eyes. In liberals’ twisted conception of morality, a man or woman can be as depraved or degenerate as they please so long as they are unrepentant about it: If you’re a homosexual but try to repress your sinful tendencies so you can integrate into normal society and raise a family, you’re worse than a dead-eyed priapistic creep who spreads incurable STDs by barebacking dudes in bathhouses; If you’re overweight but trying to get skinny, you’re worse than fatasses who make no effort to improve themselves but instead cry about how the world needs to “accept” them; If you support traditional marriage but get caught cheating on your wife, you’re worse than an unemployed single mother with five kids from four different daddies.

In that same sense, liberals expect conservatives to adhere to a code of conduct—civility, gentility and respect—that they themselves don’t follow. Any conservative that refuses to play by this handbook is tarred as evil: “racist,” “misogynistic,” “homophobic” or what have you, yet playing by the handbook ensures that you will never be able to make an impact fighting the left.

Now, that is a correct observation. By way of contrast, this is the trollette he outed from her blog

ponytoes asked:
Things should have cooled off already… How many pieces of hate mail a day would you say you’re still getting on average? Or have things for the most part slowed down? It seems like its still going pretty strong. P.S. sorry humanity sucks.

Not sure… I may get one or two mra/trolls a day who want to fill my inbox with dick cheney’s shit stain… but aside from that, it’s died down here. If I turned that anon feature back on, I’d be flooded for sure.

You know, I don’t care how many people are in your inbox. If you blog, you should know how to filter spam and ban people. But if you are begging for sympathy after implying that anyone who opposes you is a Republican (woman, I am not American) and uses crude metaphors, then. sympathy. left. the. building.

And we should not have any tolerance for it within the church. We need to accept that people fail. They do. Every day. When a fat person has a carb binge, get them back to the gym and on the diet. When a drunk falls off the wagon, but them back on it. But the person who is trying to deal with the sins and tendencies that are their personal weaknesses should get our support.

Not be linked with Dick Cheney. As if Dick Cheney is the source of all evil: he is not. Evil comes, as James pointed out, from our own desires.