About a year ago, I swapped places with one of my cousins. We stayed at the other’s house, and did the things the other would have normally done on a weekend, including visiting the other’s church and youth group. While I was there, they had us watch a documentary about missionaries who delivered supplies that were hard to get to villages on the ground. And from the way the people who were showing the video acted, I think they were training a couple of kids from here to do that. My only problem with that is that they were trying to convert the villagers to the missionaries’ religion, teaching them to think that all Christians do good things like that, baiting their trap with honey.

As I saw, it can be very irritating when people do good things only because of their religion, or even worse, doing it so that people will join them. However, the real thing that made me decide not to come back there again (except for trolling, always a good reason) was the fire and brimstone speech by the leader of the group. I have to say that I had never seen anyone with the uber-cliched “Convert to Christianity or you’re going to hell!!!!1!!” speech before. It made me run for the hills (e.g. the bathroom) for the sake of my sanity. I really don’t like it when people push their views upon others, and most of ones that you see doing that are Christians.

The effect of those views may be quite jarring, but other effects can be quite subtle. About a week ago, I signed up for a nightwatch, in honour of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The location should have tipped me off to it’s nature, as it was in the Grace Cathedral. What I was expecting was a nice night, in which we learned about him and honoured his memory. What I got was an pseudo-spiritual event in which there wasn’t enough food, the main focus was on religion, and they deprived a bunch of teenagers of enough sleep that a good couple of them thought they felt the presence of God. Seriously, I’m surprised that they were even able to wake any of us up. Less then 5 hours of sleep does not a happy or sane teenager make.(You can tell that this is still a bit of a sore spot for me.) There were prayers that everyone had to join in on, and we were forced to listen to droning priests. I can only compare it to a stoner cult gathering. I do believe that the sole reason that I didn’t just find my way home (despite the fact that we were in the middle of S.F., and I had no idea where the nearest BART station was) was that they were accepting of gay people. If that hadn’t happened, the odds are that I would have set up pranks and traps around the church, as I see people like that as acceptable targets.

It’s quite sad that there are some Christians who see the nice Christians (e.g, tolerant people) as being “too gentle”, or “too forgiving”. This is the variety that doesn’t have much time left in the modern world, as they have lasted far too long already. This is the kind that sees anyone who isn’t a white Christian as a heathen, and will either convert them or kill them if no one’s stopping them. It’s even gone to the point that they’ll conquer a country, and then straight out prohibit even learning about the country’s own culture. And, think about how they justify discrimination, using their Bible. They use parts of it from more than several thousand years ago, despite the fact that they were written in another era, when things such as slavery were acceptable. People have to change, or they’ll be drowned by the rising tide.

I’d say that Christianity has a pretty bad history, doesn’t it? How many atrocities have people justified with Christianity? There’s the crusades, conquering the Aztecs, viewing the Native Americans as “Savages”, and even today, most hate crimes are against targets that many conservative Christians don’t like. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What about the scientists like Galileo, who the church didn’t like because their theories went against what the church taught? Think about the crusades, in which so many people went to fight believing that God was on their side, which was what the church told them. Then the reason they killed so many during the Salem witch trials was because they thought they were going against their religion. Even now, there’s Christians who opposes gay marriage, “Because it goes against the Bible”, or, “Because it’s unnatural”. There’s still sexism, like in the Vatican, where they wouldn’t let a woman serve as a bishop. Even Thomas Jefferson said,

“Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites.”

What with all of these, it’s a wonder that the church can get anyone to follow itself, even if it changes it’s appearance more then Mithos does. What most Christians need to realize is that we’re all human, and having a certain religion does not make you above everyone else, nor give you the right to force others to conform to your views. Geez, they could stand to lighten up a bit. What’s the point of life, if not to have fun, learn tolerance, have friends, and not regret things you do?