A Repsonse to Hatred, Part I: Hate Makes My Heart Hurt
Sometimes I just can't bear to see people whose hearts are so filled with hate that they celebrate the deaths of thousands of innocents on September 11 and in South Asia and act in such hateful ways that I find to be just beyond description.
And I'm not talking about al-Qaida terrorists or those often-referred-to "Muslim extremists". I'm talking about American citizens who claim Christianity as their religion.
The hateful website of those whom I saw in action on tonight's episode of Nightline will not be directly linked to on this site, nor will its hateful URL be mentioned here. Anyone wishing to find it can Google "Westboro Baptist Church", the more inocuous name that this group of hateful people at times assumes. This site almost gleefully states, "Matthew Shepard has been in hell for 2285 days," later urging readers to more or less get over it because any "caterwauling" or the like would not even "buy ... one drop of water to cool [his] tongue."
Now, I would expect a Christian group that believes homosexuality is a sin and a ticket to hell to express a little more remorse over the fact that they believe the souls of many human beings formed in God's image to be residing in hell.
Well, given the fact that the past is indeed unchangeable, perhaps these who consider themselves servants of God are spreading the message of His love to those who they believe are on the way to hell but still alive and able to be saved. Oh, but love is not the name of the game with these people. (Interesting, since love is the name of Someone's game!) They attempt to reach people– if they even pretend that saving souls is their objective– by yelling at them and at those around them, telling them that God hates them. Yeah, that's effective.
I honestly don't know what motivates these people. Pure hatred? The need for attention? Intellectual failures? Misdirected religious devotion? I don't know. What I do know is that yelling at people, judging them on the behalf of God (Isn't that supposed to be a no-no?), and not making the message of God's redeeming love available to them does absolutely no good and probably even worsens things.
Rather than drawing anyone into the Church, I suspect that the denigrating tactics of groups such as this serve not only to further alienate their "target audience", so to speak, but also to alienate many heterosexual Americans who would generalize the hate of these few to describe the disposition of the whole of Christianity. While I feel that such a generalization would be horribly inaccurate, with a certain lack of information, it wouldn't be a hard generalization to make.
So let's recap: People like those of the Westboro Baptist Church are on the streets, actively pushing gays and straights alike away from knowledge of a loving God by doing the exact opposite of what we are called to do, radiate and share His love. They're apparently disobeying God and perhaps even ensuring that some people will go to hell rather than heaven. That kinda sounds like what I would think of as Satan's objectives, but I surely won't attempt to pass eternal judgment on any of these people. That's not my place.
However, these people sure think it's their job to pass judgment, and in the words of one unidentified WBC member featured on Nightline tonight, "If you live like the devil, you're going to die and go straight to hell." I don't know about y'all, but I'm sure praying that that won't end up being the case for this woman and her fellow churchmembers.