Gods Help them.

I'm sick and tired of hearing religious extremists attack those who feel that they can live their lives without religion, as if my very presence, even though I keep my mouth shut about it, causes them to be oppressed. They try to legislate the government to become a christian one, because they feel that they have most of the country standing behind them. The sad thing is, they might be right. Right now, with things as they are, they can probably legislate religion into the primary law of the land (as long as the corporations are free to rape and pillage as they please). But you know what my response to that idea is: France. Europe has long dealt with peoples that have an overabundance of faith and a dearth of compassion, and they have revolted in many small and large ways against it. The teacher is a joke, the law is a joke; this is one of the things that percolates in the young, a revolt on some level against authority. For some, this rebellion is wild, unfocused, and ultimately pointless. But for some, they start looking for answers, still the young child asking "Why" and because is no longer an answer that they can accept. If you place God as the Order, then children will rebel, maybe not all, but perhaps enough to change things. And when your order offers no answers but because drawn from a piece of over-translated fiction, they will reject it. I see it already among the people I knew at college, among many of them, religion was a joke, something to be laughed at and laughed off. But start attacking them, and they will start attacking back. And they will bite. Hard. And you will begin to remove God from public life. It's a cycle, a vicious one. The words change, but the melody remains the same. This country was founded by people looking to get away from religious oppression, and time has removed those oppressions from Europe and installed them here.

Christians: Stop attacking science. It just encourages science to attack you. You book is a castle built of cards, with little holding together except inertia. If you try to place God in the holes of theory, you are forced to defend those holes, even while science closes them. Try to insert your God, and he will be crushed and ground up as science seals up the holes. Stop declaring yourself morally superior to those around you. You're human. No better then the rest of us, and perhaps worse, because you think you have an out for your actions, the chance to be a bastard and still be saved because you believe in Jesus. I live knowing that my life will be judged only by the actions that I take, and that might be all my life means.

One anecdote to close out this rant: I spent some time with my grandfather over the holidays, and relished in the rabidly liberal conversations that were exchanged. But I noticed one difference, I had no respect for religion, just because it was a man's religion, while my grandfather tried to judge a man on broader terms then that. This one difference is, I think, because of the preaching and preening I've grown up with. A minister on a TV or a pulpit starts at huckster, and has to redeem himself from that point with me. It's not a hard trail, but that is the way I view things.