Slander and defamation of character are murder committed with words!
The most illiterate, illinformed, mental midget in town—who couldn’t get a hearing on any issue on planet earth—that idiot can draw a crowd if he’ll start slandering somebody. We put to death a man who takes a gun and blows another man’s head off. We call him a murderer. But the man who will criticize and castigate another person’s reputation…a man who will destroy in moments what another man has taken a lifetime to build…that man we applaud. We shake his hand. We ask for more verbal garbage. We do not call him the murderer that he is.
Words spoken in anger, bitterness and retaliation cannot be taken back; the damage cannot be undone. A peasant slandered a friend and later went to the priest for confession. He said to the priest, “I want to make peace with God for my vicious words.” The priest told him to fill a big sack with goose feathers and drop them on the door of every home on the village. So he did it. Then he came back to the priest and said, “Now what must I do?” the priest said, “Take your sack and go collect all those feathers.“ When the peasant tried to collect the feathers, he could not find a one. He went back to the priest and told him the wind had blown the feathers away. The priest said, “And so it is with your words; they are easily dropped, but you can never collect them again.”
Source: Twelve Sunday Morning Part 3
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