Matt Forney has just experienced what it is like to be the subject of 15 minutes of hate. His site is NSFW, but generally amusing with some truthiness thrown in. HOwever, he basically has been taken down by the rage of the hurt, and has had to move to a standalone server — which costs.

A few weeks back, I posted an article titled “The Case Against Female Self-Esteem” that made the argument that girls these days are too full of themselves and that combating female self-esteem will help restore balance to the Force. It went viral on Tumblr Tuesday, garnering me 80,000 views in a single day and forcing my webhost to throttle my bandwidth. I had figured that would be the end of it, but Wednesday actually doubled to just under 170,000 views… and it would have been higher had my webhost not killed my site to keep their servers from melting down.

What is interesting is that people told him he was shameful (meh) an embarrassment to men (son) mankind, hereto-normative, that he should be taken down from the internetz, and that he should geld himself or remove himself from society. The Post went up in September — and the first half of the comments are hilariously funny. Until October 8, when it just became one screed of hate and complaint, and I stopped reading.

Now, why am I referring to the man who was known as Ferdinand? He’s no Christian: at times he is scathing about those of Christ. The answer is that five minutes of hate will come to all of us, for our society has turned from the right, the good, and (since both come from God) God himself.

Matthew 10:16-23

¹⁶“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. ¹⁷Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; ¹⁸and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. ¹⁹When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; ²⁰for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. ²¹Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; ²²and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. ²³When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.”

Be crafty. My real name is known: but I live in a small nation. I work in a high risk part of medicine. I’m more worried about what my patients could do than what someone on the Internet thinks of me — and I’m not that worried about that, since I obscure the details of my life in real life and here. I pay for my own server so I only need to worry about what the server host thinks, not some corporation. And I back it up.

We have to live our lives without fear: we need to take the reasonable steps (that are legal where we live) to keep safe and the we have to trust God. But we should not delude ourselves that we will not get into trouble simply by being of Christ.

This applies particularly to those who are going to US propaganda (sorry, higher education) institutes, where Christian == hateful, and having the usual desire for the opposite sex == heteronormative == evil, and even eating well and being fit is seen as a kind of oppression. These places are nuts, and you are best to go to classes there — but live elsewhere, if not attend classes remotely.

And in this climate, it really does not matter what we say. The trials are merely for show, and to allow for a ceremony of faith. Our suffering is our witness. Being nice to those who hate us is not being loving to them, for being loving to them involves telling them the very truths they have blocked their ears to, while screaming at you to shut up.

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On matt’s thesis that self esteem is unattractive in a woman — I take a different view of self esteem. I see it as a form of idolatry.

It is worthwhile noting that we are not to puff ourselves up, measuring our self esteem as if that is our effectiveness (it is not) but to have a sense of what we can do… and then do it well. We are not to be shameful and refuse to step forward out of a overly pious sense of unworthiness. We are all unworthy. We all fail. Daily.

But we are not also to see ourselves as more than we are. To do that is to conform to the heresy of Oprah — that self esteem and self development is our goal in this life. It is better to listen to the reformed divines: “The chief aim of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever” . It is not about ourselves. It is about, instead, Christ.

So let us pray not to come to the trial, and if we do, that we glorify God when it is our turn to have five minutes of hate.