Be nice, you (expletive)!

I encountered a post on Facebook recently that did not make me particularly cheerful. The cartoon depicts two panels, each showing the same thing: a man speaking to a child. The first panel, labeled “Fundamentalist”, shows the man saying something along the lines of, “Be nice, or you’ll violate commandments causing you to go to hell, disappoint Jesus, make a mockery of His crucifiction…”. The second panel, labeled “Secularist”, shows the man with a different speech balloon saying simply, “Be nice.” The point is clearly to show how much better secularists are because they teach the same morality without all the religious guilting and threats.

The comments were a mixed bag of responses from “We should all be nice,” and “We don’t need religion to teach us to be nice,” to “Those stupid religionists should be considered child-abusers for such indoctrination”.

As a religious person, I object to such mis-characterization of my beliefs. Even so, I’m not so certain that giving children no reasons for being good is any better than wrong reasons for being good (and “wrong” is certainly open to interpretation–as is “nice”, for that matter). I was irritated to see yet another attack on me and what I believe just because others want to believe something else but are too insecure to simply believe what they want and allow me the same privilege. Sure there are religious jerks who abuse their religion. But there certainly are enough secularists who abuse their secularism, too.

But then it struck me just how ironic the cartoon was in the first place. Here is a cartoon using the moral ideal of “be nice” to be mean! Because any definition of “nice” that doesn’t include not putting others down or twisting their beliefs to prove your own superiority is an incomplete definition.

Look, it’s tough enough to be nice for any reason, period. Heaven knows I’m not a nice person, even by my own definition. And though my religion encourages me to “turn the other cheek”, I don’t do so well with that. But while it’s no excuse, it’s certainly not helping to have people regularly calling me names, putting me down, and mocking my beliefs. That does not encourage me to be nice, thank you very much. But it also does not justify my being mean back because someone else was mean first.

I suspect if we’re really interested in supporting others in their efforts to become better people there are more helpful ways of going about it. And if we’re not really interested in supporting others in their efforts then perhaps we should just leave them alone and not make it any more difficult.

Or to coin a phrase, “Be the nice you want to see in the world!”