Elitism bores me

It sometimes amazes me when I see the lengths to which people will go to try and feel superior to other people. It's not just the usual "I'm rich, and therefore better than you poor people", or "I'm poor, and therefore not as snobby as you rich people" thing that I'm referring to - people will use anything as an excuse to feel "elite".

For instance, is there a blog you tend to visit a lot, that allows comments? Take a look through them sometime, and I bet you'll notice that the regular posters tend to feel a bit superior to the newbies. (This is a more modern version of something that has always existed on Usenet and mailing lists.) To be sure, there is a certain amount of legitimacy when correcting and/or chastising someone for just jumping into a culture without knowing anything about it, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the smug feeling of superiority that people sometimes get, just because "I've been [reading|posting to] this [blog|website|mailing list|chat room|whatever] for X months, and you've only been here for a couple of days, so therefore I'm better than you".

I see it all over the place. People feel superior to other people because they drive better cars, because they dress better, because they listen to better music... blah blah blah. And it bores me. Why should I feel a need to prove myself to you, and substantiate your feelings of superiority? Well... actually, I don't feel a need to prove superiority, so you can keep on believing whatever you want. If you want to feel superior because you have a computer that's X% faster than mine, even though I'm a geek, feel free.

(Luckily, I don't feel superior to the people that feel superior to me. That would be a bit too meta for my liking...)

It's sad how Christians will fall into this, as well. Even though we're saved by grace, and not by anything we do, Christians will sometimes feel superior to non-Christians. This is a slap in the face to God for everything He has done for us.

Incidentally, this post sounds a lot more vitriolic than it was intended to. Aside from the Christian aspect, I don't really have strong feelings on the subject one way or the other...