WHAT I HATE

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TLW (The Little Woman) teaches little 7-year olds about their religion, educating them about Jesus and trying to make the world a better place. This is more than I do; however I feel sorry for her. It seems she must try to reason with these kids about good vs. bad, and how to accept everyone in this world as an equal.

Unfortunately, in this day and age of enlightenment, we seem to be stuck in the same old habit of hating anyone who is different. Not only do we hate, we teach our children to hate too. For years I believed in my faith and then it dawned on me one day that it is a failure for me. After 2,013 years of preaching, 2,013 years of sermons, what have we got? We have 7-year olds that with venom in their mouths, and learned hatred in their hearts, pointing out that Jews are some kind of culprit for all the world’s problems! 7-year olds making this distinction, and where do they get it from?

My two sons have the teacher of this little 7-years old girl as their mother. This little girl chose to tell teacher that someone was an evil Jew: something dirty and therefore should be watched, not trusted but hated! My sons don’t think that way as far as I can see into the past and will bet on the future. They respect anyone and everyone and leave me with some hope for the future.

I am not pinning medals on myself or my family, I am pointing out how polarizing religion is making us all, that the bricks and mortar that most seem to gather in the name of God is where we cement our hatred and solidify our thinking that only we are the truth! How insane. God I hope doesn’t hate Jews or Muslims or Christians. It is one thing to say one of us is wrong, but something even more shocking to say we are all wrong.

I’ve been blessed with Jewish friends, my best man and best friend is a Jew, and we are like brothers. I have two men on the board that I serve on that are guys I would walk through a brick wall for. Why, because they accept me as an equal, a colleague and friend. They are Jews and twice a year I enjoy their company up in Albany where there is just a group of us with a common cause and no axe to grind. They don’t wear their religion on their sleeves, as I refuse to.

You must be shocked as readers that this is what I believe in, but it is. I have tried to reconcile what the priests, rabbis and ministers preach with what many of them do with their intolerance, secret lives of contradiction and all the victims they have singled out in their worlds of piety. I don’t think I need a church or another man to tell me I love my neighbor, I know that, I can see that I need to teach my children that, putting money in a collection plate doesn’t sooth my conscience or heal all that is evil in me. Oh, I still believe in God, I just don’t need someone to tell me I have to, insult my intelligence by defying their own teachings and behaving other than the way they tell me to.