i certainly think some of the offending christians needed their respective bottoms spanked, hate crime or no.
religion can be a very important source of personal fulfillment and enlightenment, and it´s sad to have it cast in a bad light by such childish and inconsiderate acts.
my personal experience with both people and religious doctrine caused me to have a very bleak look on christianity (in a nutshell: it´s hard to be truly tolerant if your beliefs say that there is only one - your - god. also, if you believe being a worshipper of your religion is essential to ´salvation´, you´re doing others a favour by converting them, even if you´re using the most extreme means at your disposal - which has some very scary implications).
on the other hand, perhaps i´m being unfair - after all, the people who have it in them to be narrow-minded fanatics will usually subscribe to whatever religion is most common in their immediate surroundings, a fact that does´t really say anything about all the other worshippers.
nevertheless, i´ve met plenty of christians to whom their religion is a great source of both comfort and inner strength, actually the same is true about most religions i have ever encountered - just because i´m adverse to a religion for whatever reasons doesn´t really give me the right and ability to judge it, and even less to judge its worshippers (contrary to what most theologians say, most people seem BETTER to me than their respective religions).
anyway, enough rambling for now... i hope i´ve been a sufficiently polite troll so please use fire and acid in moderation
[ 05-03-2002, 09:29 AM: Message edited by: F. Gottwald ]