...It's amazing what pops into your head as a blog topic. Some of my best ones come from just listening to the radio or reading the news. Well, last night I was actually looking for inspiration as I listened to the radio before dropping off to sleep. The late night host was talking about whether or not "hell" was an actual place and was referencing the Bible in his discussion with callers. In no place, he said, in the Bible is Hell mentioned as an actual place. He made a very good point - If Hell is a place, then God must have created it. And if God created it, then God must be present there, and therefore it cannot be Hell, since the idea is that God would not be present in such a place. Revelations is the only book that actually makes a reference to the physical Hell.

Now, I don't know if that's true, but that's not the point of this blog. A caller came in and disagreed and said that the host must hate God (this is a guy who also hosts a show called "God Talk" and is rather devout). This was in response to the host saying that he disliked the idea of God creating Hell for us and then leaving it to the devil. Somehow the fact that the host said he disliked something turned into the listener saying he hated something.

Now I've gotten to today's point. It's too often that our words are misinterpreted to suit someone else's argument. I was recently involved in a conversation about something that had changed. I expressed a great like for the original version and didn't like the new addition. Never said that I hated it, just that I preferred the original - another individual had expressed the same opinion prior to my walking into the conversation.

That's when the person who made the change labeled us as "hating" the changes. We didn't hate the changes. We never said we hated the changes. We simply preferred the original version and wanted to be able to go with that, without the alteration that was made. That opened the door for another individual to state that we were also haters of the alterations, and I felt that was done in a less than polite way. Either way, my statements and the statements of another person were completely twisted around to suit whatever end they wanted to the conversation.

It's all the same right? You dislike something, therefore you must hate it. I know the definition of hate is to dislike something, but hate is an intense dislike of something. I didn't feel that emotionally pushed by the changes to say that I hated it. I just didn't like it and preferred the other. It's not that the changes made the end result abhorrent - quite a few people liked the changes and others didn't.

I think I'm just a little stunned that an opinion that I expressed (and not expressed that strongly I didn't think) was shunned and vocalized as hatred. Ok, maybe not stunned, but certainly put off. Do I want to do any sort of business with this person if they're going to be overly sensitive about criticism on changes they've made? Well, I know they own the end result of the product, but they should be able to take customer criticism graciously. Calling out a potential customer's opinion as being hate isn't appropriate. But it's all too common in today's world, especially online. And hate does mean dislike, even if it's intense dislike...

...so really, it's all the same, right?