religion

I am shoved to this podium when I have no right to be other than the religion I so staunchly defended as a seven-year-old and live through today.

As kids, we like our world to be black and white. We want good guys to don capes and bad guys to twirl mustaches. We prefer answers from our parents like “yes” and “no” instead of the far more mystifying “maybe.”

This view of Christians as morally superior to others is all too common. Native Americans were slaughtered and raped by generations of European settlers. Never mind that they had lived sustainably on the land for millennia; never mind that their retaliatory violence was an attempt to protect their homes; never mind that they could have contributed so much more than maize to the settlers’ lives. They believed in animalistic nature gods and, therefore, were little better than animals themselves. The Crusades were a centuries-long bloodbath borne of the belief that everyone should be Christian. Judeo-Christian values have wrought the fruitless, zero-sum blood feud between Israel and Palestine: complete unwillingness to compromise, bolstered by years of gruesome violence on both sides, backed by each group’s unyielding belief that they are the chosen people.