People of the world unite!

I ran across an article that suggests that there are things that Christians and Athiests "...can (and must) agree on." The number one item is this,

"Celebrating the death of somebody you disagreed with pretty much makes you a dick."

I believe this is in part referencing the recent protests by Westboro Baptist at the funerals of soldiers killed while serving in Iraq. I think most people will agree that Fred Phelps and his followers definitely fall into the classification of assholes.

But this post isn't about ol' Freddy, or even the various assholes who decided that Jerry Falwell deserved to die just because they didn't agree with him. No, this post is about the simple fact that dispite all of our disagreements, there are things that we can all agree upon regardless of our religious views, and one universal truth is that there are a minority of extremely vocal assholes of every faith.

Taking the current so called "war on terror" as an example. We have a small group of muslim assholes who are bombing innocent villages, and wreaking havoc on otherwise peaceful people. Is it then fair to say that all muslims are an evil warmongering breed just because of those extreme few? Is it fair to call all Christians bad just because Hitler decided to murder thousands of Jews because he believed God wanted him to?

I think not.

I think left to their own devices most people would get along just fine. There are places in the world where Sunni and Shiite muslims live quite happily together, and the Bosnians and Serbians were perfectly fine together until that Milosevic guy came along and decided they shouldn't.

The point is that Fred Phelps, Slobocan Milosevic, and Osama Bin Laden are all examples that being an asshole has nothing to do with faith. Faith simply provides a convenient justification for their assholery. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that things done for the right reasons don't really need to be justified.

Take a recent story from Medicine Hat, Alberta for example. There a group of local citizens renovated the home of a young, pregnant, widow for no reason other than it was the right thing to do for someone who needed it. I think it proves what I'm trying to say. I don't know what the religious backgrounds were on all the people who helped were, and to be honest it doesn't matter. Just as assholery trancends faith, so too does kindness, mercy, and love. You don't have to agree with everything everyone says to you, but don't be a dick about it either.

And that's all I have to say about that.