(Apologies to Rage Against the Machine for the title.)
Many years ago, I saw a dramatization of the life of Jesus. Unremarkable, except for not being overly preachy. Not memorable, except for their depiction of the last temptation in the garden of Gethsemane. The Devil, in addition to temptation, shows Jesus images of the future, including one stark snippet: a Crusader, soaked in blood, wading through battle on horseback, swinging a sword to slaughter a foe, and bellowing a battle cry:
"In the name of Jesus Christ!"
The message is stark: evil as well as good will follow from what is to come. Turn away, or continue forth?
Full disclosure: I don't identify as a Christian. I don't know whether there's no God, one God, three Gods, or a million million gods out there. But others have tried to impose their certainty upon me.
Notably, last winter, when I got drafted into the Hellenic Army as an infantryman, to serve out the legally mandated term so that I could work here for an extended period of time. People mistook "agnostic" for "atheist", got it stuck into their heads that maybe I was a Catholic instead of a Greek Orthodox, and more than once I ended up on latrine cleanup duty while the training regiment went for church services. (Of around six hundred conscripts, I was one of five or six non-Orthodox anomalies.) To most of the conscripts, the religious tenets were self-evident, and some of them tried to convince me that I was being an idiot not to accept them. (Typical comment: "well, if there are a million gods, there'd have to be one in charge, right? It's only logical.")
I just let it slide, mentally, until two days before my buyout discharge date, when I got confronted on my apostasy by the regimental chaplain, of all people.
He was that day's officer in charge for dealing with paperwork and discharge issues, and he was curious about the mangling of my name into Greek - spelled one way in my birth documents, another way in my draft papers, middle name grafted onto my first name. His solution to the tangle was obvious: "what name did they give you when you were baptized?"
My folks didn't raise me as part of any religion, they didn't have me baptized, they didn't indoctrinate me; they basically let me figure it all out myself, ask questions and seek out answers until I found something that satisfied me.
The chaplain, backed up by an NCO, knew better, of course: when I got back to Athens, I had to get myself baptized, urgently. Now here I was, a professional lawyer, well-educated, and a buck private rifleman being ordered by an officer to join a religion. They honestly thought that it was essential to my future well-being, an attempt to fill a gaping hole in my essential being, whereas in my mind (I didn't think of the analogy at the time, and wouldn't have dared voice it even if I had), it was less a matter of fitting a peg into a hole, and more driving a thick spike into a solid block of wood, which would splinter it.
All I could do was mutter about looking into it when I got back to Athens; what was I to do? Tell an officer and an NCO to go to hell? What bugs me even now is that they were so earnest about it, so convinced that forcing me into a religious mold I didn't fit was The Right Thing To Do.
Didn't matter that I was being put through basic training, taught how to kill, and handed a weapon that would have left the Crusaders either horrified or drooling with desire. Didn't matter that I would prefer to live and let live, try to live my life according to the Golden Rule as best I could, without worrying about the dogmatic trappings of organized faith, while for myself, just trying to find my own way, spiritually speaking. Oh, no, they knew better. I had to be brought into the hierarchical church structure, had to become faithful, obedient, subservient.
They knew the right thing to do.
Like the Crusaders. Like the Inquisitors. Like the witch-hunters. Like the bombers.
Like the guy who gunned down Dr. George Tiller in church on Sunday.
"In the name of Jesus Christ!"
eta: edited because a typo bugged me.