Adam, I'm wondering how your priest/preacher/God would feel about your calling people names. Not favorably I'm guessing. You can treat people with respect even if you disagree with them.
I've always been a bit conflicted on this. (Ok, not conflicted on
this specific situation, but more broadly).
Jesus did a fair amount of insulting, when He was particularly indignant. (i.e. calling people you cheating snakes, fools, etc - which I believe can be fairly compared with a modern day verbiage of just calling somebody an a-hole or a moron)
On the other hand, much of the new testament affirms the expectation that we will love people with the love of Christ (which sometimes focused more on correction, sometimes more on forgiveness, depending - the Holy Spirit guides us I think in these situations).
Then again, it is my personal opinion that the majority of the times in the Bible where we are called to love others is actually referring to other believers. Don't anyone jump on me too hard for that, it doesn't mean I'm saying we should hate unbelievers, I just read the verses and they clearly seem to be talking about within the church - in fact many of them say "each other" or "one another" which quite LITERALLY means one another of you - not others. I do think there is some value in recognizing this (perhaps controversial) interpretation, though ... It would free us up to realize that we most definitely can engage with [society, government, conversations] on an assertive level [when we think it's truly the right thing to do], rather than if we had a super-vague definition of Love (like the secular world does) which basically means to never offend anyone.
Now pbaldy forgive me please in advance, as I'm not actually disagreeing with you, it just made me think of a halfway-related thing that's often occurred to me when reading the Bible and figured I'd bring it up.
