"I love humanity, but hate people." Edna St. Vincent Millay

I was in sixth grade when a friend told me I was going to go to hell because I wasn't baptized. Thus began my long-standing distrust of organized religion.

I like to tell this story a lot because one, I'm still friends with that friend even though religion is a major divisive factor in our relationship, and two, I think it highlights the typical "us vs. them" mentality of many religious organizations: a person is bad because they are different. And the differences abound: sexual orientation, race, culture, political stance, you name it, someone probably hates it and is preaching against it in a pulpit somewhere.

Case in point: Dr. Tiller, a Kansas doctor, was killed a few days ago as he was entering his church, most likely shot because of the fact that he performed abortions. Apparently, he had been shot at several times before this. When I read this, I wanted to cry and grit my teeth at the same time. Okay, perhaps we're going out on a limb to say that the gunman was most likely a "pro-life" advocate who did not approve of the doctor's stance on abortion. But nonetheless, there have been plenty of instances of abortion clinics being bombed and other doctors killed because of how they sided on the issue of choice. And so we come to the other side of the coin, the "pro-lifers" who want so badly to protect the supposed lives of innocent fetuses that they will kill to do so. I don't have to point out the derailment of logic in this equation, but I feel compelled to ask how the Christians manage to rationalize this. If the supposed tenet of Christianity, or one of them at least, is "love thy neighbor" (oh, and how killing is a sin, too, supposedly) that they can stand by someone who goes to take their gun out of their chest, walk over to a house of worship (which is supposed to be sacred as well, right?), and then proceed to murder an innocent man.

Perhaps here's the hang-up: they don't view him as innocent. To them, he's a killer of innocent people since there is a belief in certain religious sects that life begins at conception so fetuses are human beings, not just blobs of chromosomes beginning to form. And so, somehow, they can justify murder because "an eye for an eye" is absolutely in the Bible!

I don't know if that is discussed in the Bible. I'm sure that if someone wanted to, they could find a passage to support whatever they want to do. It's a subjective analysis.

Whenever I began to rail on religion as a whole, my mother often counters with something along the lines of "Well, not all religion everywhere does awful things." Usually I scoff and go into something about the Crusades and genocides waged in the name of religion and the Pope telling the world not to use condoms because it "won't stop the spread of HIV." But maybe she's correct, and it's more of a matter of a few bad apples spoiling the whole bunch. It's like the Millay quote that I love and think of often: "I love humanity but hate people." People are the ones who are jerks and mess everything up.

Really, though, one needs the whole in order to get anything done. It's the whole that brings together like-minded individuals with similar ideas about killing people who deviate from their moral compass which they believe is the only correct compass in the world. And they will keep believing it, even when this little thing called the legal system comes a-calling.

Never fear though, because they were only doing J.C.'s work so they'll get into heaven anyways. Meanwhile, my unbaptized self will be toiling away in the underworld with the rest of the deviants. Considering all of the intellectuals, atheists, homosexuals, and others that will be joining me, it's sure to be one hell of a party.