I want to respond to these:

And when one particular belief of a tiny fraction of christians is criticised this is not an attack on 'christianity' any more than a critique of one Taliban action or belief is a critique of the whole Muslim world.

... the last thing on my mind was the bashing of Christians or anyone else, especially as I am one myself. I suppose it goes to show how thin skinned some people are. The fact is that there are many weirdoes out there in this wonderful world of ours....

Stop and think how it is actually happening here at Mudcat. Threads like this are accepted as fine, but posts presenting a more positive view of the faith are often not, and people who are just speaking from their own experience are attacked for "getting in people's faces." We end up with a skew-view. By month's end, all that has been said and remembered is the bad.

Do we really have to do that-- keep finding something bad or dumb to attack, in order to get at our own ideas?

Fiolar, is your opening post really the message about your faith that you want to leave people with, if that's all they may happen to see of it?

Wolfgang, do you not realize that to keep directing people's attention only to the stupid or wrong part of a thing is to enlarge existing prejudices and create a basis for new ones? I don't appreciate being mistaken for Tammy Faye Bakker any more than you would probably appreciate being mistaken for Hitler.

It's lovely to see the commitment here to free speech. It's too bad it was missing when others were silenced.

~Susan