I would like to entitle today’s post as the “Can’t Make This Up Department”. But it takes up the entire post and has everything to do with language attributed to Jesus of Nazareth.
Over the past few days I installed a Firefox browser. Its security suggestions included asking if I wanted a “Primary Password” to protect sensitive information. Read the following from the instructions for yourselves:
Primary Password is replacing Master Password
Firefox is removing terminology from the browser that has been identified as derogatory or exclusionary. We’re listening to conversations happening within the Mozilla community and in the world at large, and are paying attention when people tell us that some terms we use in Firefox exclude and damage people.
‘Master-slave’ is a metaphor that perpetuates racism. Firefox strives for inclusion and clarity; we have no need for terms derived from harmful metaphors when we have plenty of alternatives that are more inclusive, more descriptive and non-racist. For this reason, all instances of Master Password are being replaced with Primary Password in the Firefox browsers and products.
Deprecating the term Master Password is also in accordance with the “Derogatory Language” section of the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines.
Well, I’m still standing. So I gather that it was not hurtful or too damaging to me.
But what is truly a pain-in-the-soul for me, Firefox, indeed downright hurtful is that you brand Jesus of Nazareth a slaver and a racist who intends to damage others including His own disciples with ‘harmful’ instruction. According to Sunday’s Gospel text from St. Mark, Jesus said to His disciples:
And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. 43 But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
St. Mark 10:42-45, RSV
Note that in verse 43 that Jesus uses the word “servant” which translates the Greek “deacon” or “minister”. But in verse 44 He uses the word “slave” to be the lot of one who wants to be “first” or “primary” among them. That word doulos is without doubt the term for someone who is under the control of another. Servants and slaves in the language of the Word incarnate (while nothing in His own usage or my citation justifies slavery)? You, the reader, judge for yourselves, knowing that the Speech Police assign and allow only one significance to any given term as they grovel under their own slavery to the revenant Marcuse (more on this copyrighted term later).
So, Mozilla folks, many if not most in the past survived the installation of your browser without feeling downtrodden, oblivious to the deleterious effects of your prior terminology. That fact shows the pathetic attempt of companies such as yourselves to placate the ginned-up wrath of an equally pathetic few whose hatred of the Hebrew-Christian ethos is itself intended to damage and destroy the “slaves” of the Word made flesh. Yet in conclusion to this segment of my oh-so-injurious post, I must ask the same question of my readers with which you concluded your compliant missive above…
“Was this article helpful?”
Father David+
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