Christianity 101

I welcome anyone from the Right who will explain to me the difference between someone who will blow up a bunch of people in a mosque and a person who will go into a church and murder someone in cold blood because that person has offended his values.

I suggest that the Christian Taliban is as much - if not more - of a danger to the United States than Al Qaeda because the former thinks it is acting in the best interests of America while the latter is deliberately trying to destroy it.

We've already seen what happens when leaders of the country show a disregard for the Constitution. Now we see what happens when a blind religious belief leads to murder.

"Congress shall make NO law respecting the establishment of religion." What part of this is so hard for the holy nut-cases on the Right to understand?

Or does this qualify me for the Christian firing squad, too?

History is filled with reasons for executing people. The Catholic church in the middle ages explained that killing people was far better than letting them live in a sinful state and possibly corrupt other innocent souls. Hitler believed in racial purity and used the execution of millions of Jews to make the world cleaner and better. Other deluded nincompoops have blown away innocent people to make a political point or remind others of a particular religion's superiority.

We Americans have a little problem when it comes to these reasons. First, we like to consider the people killed instead of the killer(s). For instance, there has been very little written about the reasons for 9/11 while forests have been chopped down in describing every detail about the victims, the victim's families and the hometowns, neighbors and even pets of those who were murdered. It's understandable that we would mourn the loss of innocent lives, but had we truly examined the motives of those who hijacked the planes that fateful September day, we might have gotten a better picture of the whole Al Qaeda philosophy and thus have been spared what will go down as the most idiotic decisions in our history, to say nothing of the loss of more than four thousand American lives and many times more innocent Iranians and Afghans.

We should remember this as we remember Dr. Tiller. We should leave no stone unturned in investigating the hate mongering that caused an unbalanced man to enter a place of worship and take a human life. We should ask whether the Founders intended that anyone who was not certifiable could buy an automatic weapon and wipe out a doctor as others have wiped out high school students, college students and anyopne else within range.

It's time to extend the idea of "pro-life" beyond the abortion issue and ask whether our position on haters and gunners may be too wussy for our survival.