What offends you, how does it make you feel, and why?

Question

I am having trouble with the concept of taking offense. I certainly understand being offended by the horrors of war, of violence, murder, rape, torture, etc. The physical aspects of these can be, and should be sickening. I can also understand taking offense at personal insults and an attack on one's character or integrity. What I have trouble with is how people can be offended by words or ideas, concepts,artistic representations, alternate lifestyles or sexual desires. We are certainly not born with the concept of being offended. What offends us is most often the result of conditioning. We are conditioned by our times, the social mores of our generation, the ideas of those who are closest to us, religion. But I cannot understand how one can feel so strongly about something that has been conditioned. It isn't a feeling at all, is it... at least, not a natural one. As someone who has never been offended by a person's sexuality or a work of art, I am asking for your input.

Answer 1

Rudeness offends me. People lacking manners, or who make rude comments. Usually I think of these people as selfish - not thinking about anyone but themselves. People are entitled to their opinions, but they shouldn't always be voiced.
Swearing offends me too (depends on the situation, in what context the words are being used), but generally it irks me.

Answer 2

Sometimes I feel affend when people ask me my age and my name. It may sound stupid, by I beleive I come from millions lines of human generations, I can only say I was born when the first human was born or something. Also the matterial and energy I am made from has existed forever in this universe but in different forms. I concider this to be true for other people around me. I can't stand the systematic questioning of application form becuase I do not really understand what they mean.

Answer 3

We are human beings, we are very complex emotional souls. Trying to understand why some are offended at one thing while another is not, it's impossible and it is what makes us unique! So, just because you do not get offended at trite things and someone does, does not make it wrong or weird. We are just different and thank god for that! We would be very boring if we all had the same point of view! And frankly I am so deeply offended at this question..LOL, just joking :) So, this is my input and my opinion!

Answer 4

I think people who are offended by something, and have been conditioned to be offended by that thing, most often feel this way because of ignorance. They don't understand something, and their conditioning keeps them from looking closely at it. Christianity does this in trying to keep people from learning about other religions, for example. Not understanding something often produces a feeling of fear, just like pain often can produce laughter. This fear is manifested as something people either try to destroy through argument or other means, or they simply run away mentally in repulsion.

Answer 5

Personally, I believe that is due to the individual person who has not attained an adult level of maturity, when most of us learn at a very young age that it is wrong to hurt one another. Unfortunately for the young, they witness their parents acting exactly the opposite by being violent and abusive to each other, the kids, and the people around them. We witness the dichotomy of this behaviour at a young age, and it affects the way we think, and the worst is that few people are willing to take responsibility for their own behaviour, regressing to schoolyard bullying and violence, and stating "They made me Mad, etc". Nobody makes you mad, period. You decide to be mad or happy, and by making those statements, and believing that they have control of your emotions is folly at best. The trick is to teach our children, of all cultures, to take responsibility for their emotions and actions, and believe only in their own opinion of themselves, never buying into anothers anger. In my opinion, some cultures have a tendency towards being violent at the drop of a hat, and that includes the Americans, and the statistics show it in how many murders and violent crimes occur in their cities every year. It is wrong to teach our children to hate, and to kill people because they are different, and this is truly being taught in some cultures, which is a shame. Thanks for listening.

Answer 6

I'm offended by uncaring people who have no respect for anyone else and are just concieted all the time and plain rude. I agree that people can be offended by things that to me seem completely normal. It just depends on the background i guess.

Answer 7

mine's simple. When somebody says i cant do something. And i really dont mean that in the bratty "i want that!" way. I mean when someone says that im going to fail the science test. But, it heals when i make the highest grade in the class and i shove it in that person's face and say "HA!"
:-)

Answer 8

it makes me feel...


offended


yup