When I say that so long as nobody is being harmed people’s decisions, choices, and actions are always acceptable and should be respected; conservative Christians often ask me: but who decides what harm is?

1/

They do this to invalidate ‘harm,’ because if we can obscure the notion of harm, and they can decide that people going to hell is really the harm we should be worried about; then they are justified in crossing every possible boundary to keep people from hell.

2/

They are “helping,” “saving,” not really harming.

That’s one of the main ways in which the concept of sin is weaponized against people; because they decide what sin is, which is what will send us to hell (except not because all we have to do is repent and then we are safe).

3/

It doesn’t matter how we define harm, how much logic we apply to explaining that when people say they are being harmed we should believe them; or how much evidence we have of harm caused. It doesn’t matter that people are literally and metaphorically bleeding. It’s not harm.

4/

I mean they justified the genocide of Native people, the forceful taking of our land, the abduction of children with sayings like “kill the Indian, save the man.” By their logic they haven’t caused harm, they have “saved” us. There is no evidence of this, but they say so 🙃.

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