Our pain is never from external input, it is always from our reaction. What those who are easily offended need to do is to learn not to react. The world will never be exactly to our liking, the key is to remain equanimous in the face of "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

I think the author has articulated well the issue about what is becoming an insidious problem in human relations.

I think when people say they feel offence they mean they are hurt, feeling some pain. Sometimes this can be used simply to try and control the speech of others and sometimes they may feel genuine pain. Last year Julia Gillard said she was deeply offended by the opinions of Corey Bernardi. If she was honest she would simply say she disagreed with him. If she wanted to try and make him feel responsible for her pain she would accuse him of causing that pain. Since there could be no good reason why she would feel pain she must have been trying to emotionally manipulate him into keeping quiet. Whatever his opinion he has a right to express it without someone trying to make him feel guilty for having an opinion different to others.

The pain that people generally feel is one of fear. They feel afraid that what they are emotionally dependent on could be jeopardised if what the ‘offender’ wanted was to come true. Religious people become offended when someone does or says something that they perceive to threaten the existence of religion. They think they need religion to cope with life. It is not what the offender says or does which causes the pain but their own dependence which causes it. They can only be hurt because they are religious. If they stopped their dependence on religion they could not be offended.

You cannot hurt someone with words who is not emotionally dependent on anything. If they are then they must take responsibility for that dependence and not seek to lay the blame at the feet of someone else even if the intention is to hurt them. Feeling hurt should be a sign that we are dependent and should analyse that dependence. It may mean coming to terms with some of our most ingrained values about race, religion, nationality and family.

if we are at the mercy of our feelings, then we can be easily manipulated by others, and cannot really call ourselves 'free';

if we are at the mercy of our reason alone, we can easily manipulate others, as psychopaths tend to do, and are also not likely to be 'free'.

human beings need to be reasonable and sentient to be whole, balanced, and free, something a good education can strive to help us achieve.

But ultimately, feelings are not facts: only the facts can guide us, the emotions can cloud our judgment.

But there are huge political gains to be made by legislating against 'offence', since one can then pander to whatever pressure group is able to supply the most votes, by charging their enemies with offensive behaviour. And since pressure groups all regard anything and everything their enemies do as offensive, this effectively puts them out of business.