This past Sunday, in Knoxville, TN, a gunman entered a Unitarian Universalist church during a worship service featuring a children's play. He opened fire with a shotgun and sent 7 people to the hospital. The news article I was reading online had a link to other readers' comments. I know I shouldn't have clicked it, but I'm an optimist. I hoped I'd see an intelligent, caring, open discussion full of compassion and calls for peace. Of course, I was wrong.
The very first comment spent about a dozen words to feel bad for the victims and a hundred to blast liberals, homosexuals, and anyone other than christians. When the next person to post pointed out--correctly, I must add--that homosexuality is biologically natural and that this kind of hate is what prompted the shooting, he got blasted by poster #3. This responder attacked him directly, claiming that people were trying to "kill God." You can see why I stopped reading.
I stopped reading because I've been reading about their god. I have something called knowledge, and I use it to dispel christianity's greatest weapon: fear. These are people so afraid to think for themselves, so afraid to go against the grain, so afraid to learn about the natural world that they would rather feel no remorse for other people's suffering than have to empower themselves. They turn a blind eye to biology, archeology, anthropology, history, and social reality. They accept the words of their clergy, most of them not even reading their whole "holy" book, let alone research its origins. Are they afraid to lift the veil of mystery they hang around it? Are they afraid to put the bible into a social, political, and historical context because it might not hold up under the slightest scrutiny?
Here is what to fear: ignorance under pressure, turning with hate on our bodies and the earth. Conservatives and christians have no original arguments, no responses based on common sense or reliable information. The same exact arguments used today--"we suffer because not everybody worships our god"--is in the bible because that excuse to spread their religion has been used for so long. When presented with data, logic, and temperance, these followers of a so-called all-loving god resort to fire-and-brimstone tactics. Like many catholic saints, the christians of today love to deal out their god's judgment, telling others they're going to hell for this or that. All they know is how to point fingers and redirect blame. They have no foundation for their restrictive, unnatural laws and no idea why non-christians don't like them. I'm sorry, but any religion that has to tear people down to build some of them back up has an obvious agenda of control. (The ironic thing is that any response to the contrary simply demonstrates the church's degree of that control.) If you can justify firing a shotgun in the presence of children, turn your nose up at those who strive toward a community built on understanding, and rip tender lovers apart based on the similarity of their genitalia while doing nothing to separate abused spouses from their heterosexual partners, you are truly the most frightened, most pitiable being in existence.
