Enroll today in Canada's future, the BFG! Bigots For God promises to return this country to its Christian roots, the nitty gritty that made this country great! Pull up those grass roots and plant them firmly in the gaping maw of the infidel!
Well, well, well... I wrote a lovely sarcastic and satirical paragraph on what I thought would be a nice mock platform for my imaginary party. I reread it and decided it was a bit too nasty, even for an imaginary party, so I deleted it. What popped into my head was, "Yeesh, this lot really does get under my skin."
The lot I'm referring to is the CHP (Christian Heritage Party) who inspired my diatribe that has since been deleted. But I see a sign every so often for their party and I get annoyed... every Christian religion I am familiar with has in its primary tenets, Jesus taught that love was the most important thing... love god, love your neighbor, love yourself. Does it really have to be more difficult than that? Is it really that important to take, letter for letter, word for word, a document that has been around for thousands of years, translated and re-translated, re-edited and re-written by hundreds and hundreds of people, and wave it in the face of everyone that doesn't follow the same paragraph and subset of words that you do? Blargh.
I was raised Christian, I'm a baptized and confirmed Catholic that goes to church on a semi-regular basis and I believe in an undefinable and incomprehensible greater power in the universe that on some days I refer to as God. I'm quite happy with the idea that Jesus walked on the earth, was a pretty cool guy and told people that they can be better than they are and that love is a good thing. I'm also a fag, an evolutionist, an inter-religious believer, a believer that both plants and animals are just as important as humans (if not more) and I'm convinced I'm immortal. A slightly paradoxical situation, but not enough to hang myself over. Or, more importantly, hang someone else.
Each and every day I run into people whose views differ from mine... some of them even piss me off enough to write stuff down. But at the end of the day I don't hate them, I don't tell them they are wrong and that I am right, I don't go out of my way to plan on how I should change the world so that it fits my vision to the exclusion of anyone's that disagrees with me...
The funny thing about the ideology of the CHP is that our country's population is constantly growing. And it's not growing with Christians, it's growing with faiths and religions from other countries. The true basis and backbone of our country is its multi-culturalism; it's what makes us special, it's what makes us strong. One hundred years ago when the first roads were cut through the forests joining the huge land mass we call Canada with trains and wagons and automobiles, there was a bigger Christian population. Not so anymore, so trying to say Christian ideology is the way to go when your audience is a mish mash of many religions and differing ways of thought is ludicrous.
Fundamentalists. They are a pet peeve. It seems like I'm picking on Christian fundamentalists, and they do seem to shine in Canada, but fundamentalists can come in any shape, colour or flavour... there are queer fundamentalists, science fundamentalists, cooking fundamentalists... etc etc etc... the term fundamentalist is traditionally used for the crazy radical religious groups, but fuck that! There's lots of other fundamentalist groups that should get the same crazy radical stigma stamped on them too. And they all get under my skin.
Live and let live, people. Intolerance is injustice.
My last thought is that we tolerant people should round up all the fundamentalists in the world and ship them to Moon Base Alpha, where they can happily fundamentalize each other into oblivion and leave the rest of us in peace. The sad part is, it would never happen, because the tolerant people generally leave the others alone. :)
