That girl killed herself because she was treated badly and didn't have tools to deal with it, not because she was any particular faith and others were a different one. The problem there is the awfulness people can indulge in, not the mask it wore. How about some accountability for her parents? The teachers? The girl herself?

There are lengthy debates at www.beliefnet about proselytizing and what it it, and is not. At least the people engaged in those debates are trying to understand something. They hang in and get into it. I have learned a lot there. Some of you have indicated privately that this has made me a "better" Christian to be around. (A better token?) I sure haven't learned much fom the threads here that have attacked religion.

I don't see anyone here trying to understand. I see people trying to express rigid opinions about things they find rigid.

A faith that is based on service to others sometimes is proselytizing and sometimes is not. I think some of you feel that Christians sit around in a smoky back room like old-fashioned Chicago Democrats, plotting how to make numbers, and that is not at all what is in the hearts of even the most rigid people you are referring to. I don't agree with a lot of the things you also don't agree with, but at least I know the people I am dealing with. Hating them, whatever your estimation of them, is not going to move you very far toward any goal of improving anything.

Try getting to actually know, as a friend, just one of the people you write about. Come from your own belief system to do it. Or does your belief system endorse attacking what you do not know and stirring up upsets?

And it's so ironic. Is anyone else doing anything for those kids after school? If there are language barriers clouding the situation, is anyone working with the parents to raise their language skills and awareness of what their kids are doing? Are these the same families we will all be complaining about when one of the lonely kids in pain takes a gun to school, "Where were the parents?" "Why didn't anyone DO something?" "Where were the churches?" "How come there is so much drug activity?"

THERE IS STILL NO SUBSTITUTE FOR GETTING TO KNOW ANOTHER HUMAN BEING.

~Susan