Knödelkarpfen
First time out of the vault
welsh said:
I tend to think that overall, all things considered, this is true. But intolerance here of any sorttakes a subtler form than it may in a place with more obvious struggles. It is perhaps comparable to when i have asked African Americans i have known if they have experienced what they perceive as rascism, and most of them have, but it often happens in such a way that it's hard for the mainstream to see, so they believe comfortably that it doesn't exist. Then they get nervous when they see a black guy walking down the street.
Living in small town Kansas and Missouri, I knew my whole life that it was somehow unacceptable to be something other than a Christian and had this reinforced all the time by my peers and also adults. No, i was not beaten, but i was disapproved of and reminded often of something which, in a setting such as public school, ought to have no bearing. My parents were a stronger influence, and their lack of any strong beliefs helped keep my brain in a more elastic questioning state, where any sort of zealotry seemed absurd, but peoples' fucking fear of their silly wrathful vision of god was nonetheless terrifying to me, just as monsters and aliens were.
I lived in small University town when i was a child. I would say 85% of the people i knew when i last lived there were Christian, and out of those, well how can i say how many of them than had any trace of fundamentalist attitudes? Perhaps not very many. But in the smalller Kansan towns, as well as many of the towns i have frequented and lived in in MO, i would say undoubtedly a larger percentage of people seem to have fundamentalist attitudes. Many times i, forgetting where i am in the world, receive a great shock when someone says something about the Moslims, the going to hell faggots, even the Catholics. Sometimes these folks are looking for agreement, which i am not willing to provide them with.
It must also be said that many of these people in my experience express intolerance of many forms, not just in regards to religion, and so it may not be best described as a religious issue per se. But certainly when people like radio host R--h L-------h try their best to become spokespeople for the entire "conversavative" community and decide to conveniently bundle ideas and beliefs together like a value meal at McDonalds, you have the unfortunate situation where people absurdly associate beliefs in their brains which ought to be kept and considered separately, and this has made issues like immigration and stemcell research become much more firey topics than they ought to be.
