Posts tagged jerks

Christians, have you ever had an atheist, on the internet or in real life, tell you that you were stupid for believing in an imaginary person in the sky?

Atheists, have you ever had a Christian, on the internet or in real life, tell you that you were stupid for rejecting Jesus and you would suffer the consequences later?

These people are annoying, right?  They’re jerks.  The thing I’ve found both on the internet and in real life is that there are about the same amount of jerk Christians as there are jerk atheists.  Being a Christian or an atheist doesn’t seem to impact whether somebody is a jerk.  Furthermore, there are the same amount of jerk republicans as there are jerk democrats.  There’s a certain percentage of mean people in the general population, and any subgroup will echo that.  The exception, of course, is in extreme hate groups (though even there, people could easily hide their inner nastiness beneath a friendly facade).

I see a lot of books where one group consists of nothing but nice people while another is full of jerks.  Usually, neither group would be classified as a hate group, so it always seems unrealistic to me.  Lazy authors create groups that are made up of slight variations on the same person.  They ignore the fact that the side of the “good guys” would attract bad or unpleasant people for much the same reasons that it attracts nice people.  Likewise, the side of the “bad guys” would attract nice people the same way it would attract jerks.

Judge for yourself what the ratio of jerks to nice people is in the general population, and then use that for any groups in your story.