Against my better judgment, I promised my mother that I wouldn’t swear on this website.

I can no longer hold myself to that standard.

Who among us actually believes that an arbitrarily established list of words should be excluded from our language in order to prove that we are upstanding members of society?

I would love to hear your argument.

The very notion of profanity is a foul mechanism used by the religious tradition to separate us into classes.

It’s a game in which we only tell half of the players the rules, so that we can know us from them.

This is simply proof that religious tradition is not here to save our souls, it is here to move us into a higher class.

Rich people say proper things like “indubitably, indeed” and poor people say “hell yeah, fuck yes”.

And we say that one is delightful and the other deplorable.

James said that “If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, ‘Here’s a good seat for you,’ but say to the poor man, ‘You stand there’ or ‘sit on the floor by my feet,’ have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?… If you really keep the royal law found in scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right.  But if you show favoritism, you sin...”

It’s become increasingly difficult to discriminate against people based on the clothes they wear.

So we have invented a new standard, their language.

We commend ourselves because we say to the poor man,”come into our church so that we can pity you and patronize you,” all the while turning neighbors away from our homes and churches because they use words that we have decided are ugly.

Even those that agree that profanity is an arbitrary standard used to judge would never do so in public.

Preachers that say damn and hell in their homes would never dare to do so in the pulpit.

As for myself, I choose to make myself the least as best as I can (which, granted, isn’t very well).  I don’t visit the lower classes, I don’t pay them a visit so that I can pick them up out of their dirty, ugly despair.

But instead, I submerse myself in them and abandon the arbitrary rules of society, which are only the rules of the rich, the lawmakers and the voters.

It is not our job to break their habits, to conform the way they speak, but to love all in the unique place where God has placed them.

Profanity is not a sign of the devil, it’s a dialect.

Next, will we discriminate against those that have been raised to speak ebonics?  It’s not a real language after all, it’s not as good as our real English.

Excuse me, perhaps I’ve hit a nerve.