Fear. It is the perfect way to win souls, and gain power. The church has been doing it for thousands of years and even today’s commercial world uses fear to persuade people. If you don’t brush your teeth with toothpaste brand X, caries will rot your teeth and with toothpaste brand Y your teeth will shine even whiter. We tell children about Christmas and Santa Claus, and when the children do not listen to their parents, they are told to be nice, because Santa knows everything . As I told here before: fear wins souls and with scared people you gain power.

Scaring people and then telling them that you have (or are) the solution to a safer life, or in religious words: to a safe afterlife, works great! At least, with the gullible people, in my eyes. There are fanatical Christians who claim that their God hates certain groups. So you have the people of Westboro Baptist Church. A group of inbred families, who can not think for themselves and do everything leader Fred Phelps has told them before.

According to WBC, their god hates faggots, Jews, the president of America, the United States itself, and the way too tolerant Netherlands are also very much hated by their god. They also thank the same god for 9/11, killed soldiers, snipers and roadside bombs. I think that the people of this controversial church also hate any form of intelligence. With their stupid actions they don’t seem to be the brightest folks to me.

I don’t understand (and I’m not going to do my best to do so) that people focus on the -in their opinion- negative things in life. For example, there is a serious Christian group that reports that their god hates tattoos and tattooed people. On their website, they claim that parents with tattoos are 300% (who comes up with these numbers?) more likely to experience child abuse, neglect and starvation, that tattoo ink is 98% marijuana, and tattoo artists fund many terrorist groups, including ISIS.

If it were a satirical website, it might still be funny, but there is a small group of people who take this idiocy seriously and thereby gain fear in others and power in themselves. They throw around various quotes from the Bible, but always forget Matthew 7:1-3. “Judge not, lest ye be judged; for with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged, and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you. Why do you see the mote in your brother’s eye, but do you not perceive the beam in your own eye?”