I am a church-going agnostic. That may sound like some sort of contradiction, but it isn't. (It's a Lutheran church, but it doesn't exactly follow the picture of Lutherans painted by Garrison Keillor, hilariously accurate though he can sometimes be. I guess you could say that this church is pretty liberal: our pastor is a young woman, our associate pastor is a large black man who wears an ear ring, and a couple members of the church council are gay.)

Fundamentalists of every stripe seem to use the Bible, or the Koran, or whatever set of scriptures their faith is based on, not as a guide for their lives, but as a license to force their beliefs on the rest of the world. But what makes me want to gag is that frequently the scriptural "justification" for the atrocity du jour they wish to commit is either a misinterpretation, generally by taking a passage out of context, or not even there at all!

Looking all through history -- the Inquisition, the persecution of the Moors and Jews in Spain and elsewhere, the obliteration of the Inca and Aztec cultures . . . a seemingly endless list that continues into this supposedly enlightened era -- Ireland, the Israelis and the Palestinians, much of what's going on in the Balkans, what certain Fundamentalist "Christian" sects want to do to this country -- just follow the news . . . one realizes that most of the horrors in the world have been committed -- and are still being committed -- by those who claim they were (are) acting in the name of God.

I may be mistaken, but I've always thought that, at the core of every religion is some variation on the admonition "love one another."

There is more than sufficient reason for the weeping of Jesus.

Don Firth