Those loving and caring Christians...

[dwckabal]

can write the most vile hate mail:

"You would look so cute without an eye to offend you and without a tongue to offend me and mine...We will make some lovely incisions in your filthy bellies and pull out those nervy Guts one by one, slow and easy. Just like the awful treatment you worldly ones have meted out to us generation after generation."

Vashti Cromwell McCollum, One Woman's Fight (Boston, 1961)

In McCollum vs. Illinois (1948), the Supreme Court struck down an Illinois law allowing "release time" for religious teaching in public schools. The religion classes were held in public school buildings, and parents who did not want their children to receive religious teaching could opt for a "secular" class during the release time period. Of course, there was no secular instruction, because 99 percent of the parents signed consent forms. Vashti McCollum argued that her son had been cruelly taunted by other students for his nonattendance at religion classes. After she filed her lawsuit, her son was regularly beaten up, and his parents had to send him to a private school out of town.

Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority concluded:

Separation means separation, not something less. Jefferson's metaphor in describing the relation between Church and State speaks of a 'wall of separation,' not a fine line easily overstepped...In no activity of the State is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in its schools, to avoid confusing, not to say fusing, what the Constitution sought to keep strictly apart...It is the Court's duty to enforce this principle in its full integrity."

The contempt with which secularists are treated even in the present is evident in such books as Modern American Religion: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960, where author Martin Marty describes McCollum as a "militant person who took pleasure in being branded 'a wicked, godless woman, an emissary of Satan, a Communist and a fiend in human form,' just as she was being hailed by others as 'a courageous heroine, a champion of American liberty, a true pioneer, democrat, and patriot.' " By branding secularists and freethinkers as troublemakers and publicity hounds, the "religiously correct" trivializes the issues they raise.

[BiggJawn]

1. Some of us really press hard on their comfort zones, don't we?

"...a wicked, godless woman, an emissary of Satan, a Communist and a fiend in human form,..."

Ever notice how we're STILL called "Gawdless Commie Bastards"?
They can't tell us to move to the USSR anymore, so it's "Why don't you move to Cuba?"...

[Az]

2. The comment that never fails to blow my mind

I will find myself confronted by some aggressive believer. They will have become frustrated at their inability to convert me on the spot. Their departing words more often than one would imagine are "Yeah, well I'll be laughing at you in hell while I am sitting in heaven".

Now.... I can't help feeling that somehow they missed some part of their religions teaching of compassion. How is it that an atheist can get the notion that its a bad thing for anyone to have to suffer for eternity but those that are dedicated to mercy and compassion just can't seem to clue into this?

[BiggJawn]

3. Because they skipped all of Jebus' talks about PRIDE...

What ELSE should we call that smug, self-rightous satisfaction they get when they're pointing out that they'll be "looking at you suffer in Hell"...Yeah, I think PRIDE works.

Where does it say in the Bible that there is a special gallery in heaven where The Saved can look down and watch and jeer at The Damned like they're some display in Yaweh's perverted zoo?