with the Religious Right and other religious types who want to retain the right to discriminate against all those who are different from them:
They do not see where their rights end and others' rights begin. If they call themselves "Christians," they forget that one of the biggest teachings of Jesus Christ was to practice their own religion in their own home or in their houses of worship, but not to go blatantly traipsing around quoting Scripture, using His name to "spread the word of God," praying in public or other public displays of religion (PDR).
I am less well-versed in other religions, but rarely do I run in to evangelical Buddhists who insist that I pray like them, join one of their monasteries or otherwise walk around in full view of others showing PDR.
Similarly, I do not often run into Jews or Hindus or Muslims who are practicing their overt PDRs and insist that I immediately convert to doing things their way.
I do, however, run into a lot of people who call themselves "Christians" who insist that I take the sacraments (blood and body of Christ? Really? Vampirism and cannibalism are not really proscribed by my spiritual beliefs of how to live humanely), that I immediately give up my ability to adequately discern religious fervor from religious zealotry and that I must all of a sudden treat other humans as "less than" simply because that is what these "Christians" deem as necessary.
Now, forgive me if I am wrong, but didn't Jesus Christ essentially teach that everyone is to be accepted and loved? I know he said something about loving your neighbor as you would yourself. I think he also was big on the whole accepting other life philosophies as being okay . . . but I might be interpreting that particular take in modern terms, and, as we all know, we must all devolve our modern culture devolve back to whatever it was 2000 years ago, in the Middle East, to be seen through the eyes of a brown prophet/son of God, in order to fully embrace the "spirit of Christ." Oops, I mean, we need to go back even further into history, devolve even further and embrace the tenets of Judaism and misinterpret the Old Testament as the literal word of God, with no room for cultural differences, linguistic changes (all y'all know that the OT was not originally written in modern English, yeah?), or poorly transcribed editions surviving and being interpreted into more local vernacular?
And, if I am causing too much with the discussion about Jesus Christ and you want to go back to the highly redacted, horrendously edited Torah, commonly referred to as the "Old Testament," wasn't it stated there that we humans are made in the image of God? And, isn't it also stated that God does not make mistakes? So, if we are all divinely made, then we all reflect some aspect of God. And, the requirement to hate those who are different kind of melts away because we are all created by God, God does not make mistakes and we are all made in His image.
So, my basic problem is that I do not approve of religious zealotry or extremism in any form, from any religion or from any part of the world. The sooner we can be honest about all forms of religious extremism and those who are religious extremists, the sooner the more moderate among us can come to understand the basic tenets of any and all religions: we are supposed to be nice to one another, we are supposed to allow for differences of beliefs (or non-beliefs) we are supposed to overlook differences and just treat each other with respect.