At this month's meeting of the atheist group which, as you may recall, I attend once a month, we watched a video of a speech which Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, Free Will, The Moral Landscape, and Letter to a Christian Nation, along with countless articles and blogs (plus a new book coming out in about a week), offered some thoughts on labels. Although he professed himself to be an atheist, he suggested that he would rather not have to identify himself as one; he would rather be known as a person who believed in the virtue of scientific experimentation and rational thought.  Like most labels, atheism, he contended, rarely contains or presents the full spectrum of a particular person's systems of belief or truth.
     As we talked about this afterwards, I indicated that I agreed.  Though I consider myself to be a Christian, I often hesitate to present myself as one.  Why?  Given the too numerous ways that Christians around the world embarrass themselves with improper behavior, ill-chosen words, expressions of violence and intolerance, and the like, I'm reluctant to be considered as one who stands in common position with them.  As has atheism, the word Christian has become a very loaded term.  On the former, no one ought to think that atheism is the sole cause of Josef Stalin's depredations upon the Russian people and, similarly, no one ought to conclude that Christianity is the only reason that a few church going people kill abortion doctors.  As any sociologist will tell us, correlation is not causation.
     So what to do?  Because we tend to think in categories, we cannot help but develop labels.  Nonetheless, without agreeing that atheists are the only people capable of rational inquiry, I will say that we all would be better off if we endeavored to listen--to listen very hard--to people before we draw any conclusions or construct any labels about how they think or what they believe.  God sees each one of us as an uniquely individual and glorious human being; we should strive to do the same.  We may not all agree, but we can at least celebrate the mutual humanness in which we have been made.
     Jesus didn't die and rise again for categories or labels; he died and rose for individual human beings.