What is "FAITH"

[Consilius]

An insult is used to make someone feel below you. We have 42 pagan men who were jeering at a prophet. They knew he was a prophet because he just performed a miracle in the name of God. They did not respect him for the reason that he was God's prophet. They were trying to show Elisha that their gods were more powerful and could step on his. God proved otherwise.
Does it make sense now?

Consilius, my friend, you have an author of a fairy tale about a god and his prophet. This author knows the script, so if he says that Elisha was a prophet, then that's who he was.

In the author's mind, Elisha is completely justified in cursing the children/men/circus clowns/village elders, and god is in his rights as Jahweh to send she-bears amongst them and rip them up for jeering at this man.

If this event even happened, and if this god is real, any outside observer will still view this as an evil act. If the crew of SNL makes a parody about Barrack Obama, then the U.S. government doesn't set a pack of hungry mountain lions loose in their changing rooms to teach them a lesson.

No matter how the scriptures justify its heinous acts, the acts are still heinous, and this god is always going to be on trial by the critical thinker.

No one said Elisha was a prophet except his actions. What he did made him a prophet, and not the Bible verse that said so.
A parody is a joke. An insult is an offense.
Also take note of the identities of the two parties. One of them works in the name of God. The other in the name of pagan gods. The offending party knows the identity of the defending party as a representative of a contradictory belief to its own, and had recently proved his belief to be true. The offending party, unprovoked, insults the defending party. Israelite pagans deliberately chose pagan gods over Yahweh because they didn't like him. The theocracy of Israel made this a political struggle as it was an ideological one. There are no grounds for harmless jokes between these two strangers. The offending party got at the defending party because of what the defending party stood for was contradictory to what the offending party stood for.
Also note that Elisha wasn't simply another Jew, he was a prophet. He pretty much had God walking alongside him on the road, because Elisha was God's diplomat. To insult a diplomat is an offense against the country the diplomat is coming from. The president of the country in this case was all-powerful and flawless, with absolute control over their very existence. The greater his power and the things they owed him, the more respect he demanded.