Recently, The Observer received, via fax, a “religious opinion” sent by a church in Topeka, KS. and I won’t mention their name because I don’t want to give them free publicity.

The church is supposed to be a member of a mainstream religion but I am pretty sure the denomination in question does not support their radically extreme ideas. I feel sorry for the church, which I won’t mention out of respect, that they claim to be affiliated with because others might think that they are the norm for this denomination.

The fax, also claiming to be a news release, was so filled with hate and violence that you could feel the heat coming off the page. It thanked God for hurricane Katrina, Pakistan’s earthquake and the tsunami in Southeast Asia last year.

Apparently, God is smiting us because Sweden is a vile “land of the damned” and they have quotes from theBible to prove it. (Don’t they all.) Yes, they have some weird sort of obsession with Sweden and its people because there was a whole rant about it included on this piece of paper.

I guess the worse thing is that they were also thanking God for “improvised explosive devices”. In my opinion, I just don’t think those were part of God’s plan and he probably doesn’t want credit for them.

Now, I don’t presume to speak for anyone else but Iwas appalled and ashamed of this congregation and I hope that others are too because, apparently, they have been spreading their brand of hate for sometime now, based on some news reports that I have read about their church.

This is yet another example of how one extremist organization can screw things up for the rest of us.

They are really no different then the terrorist groups in the Middle East except that they call themselves Americans. Personally, I wish they would move somewhere else but I wouldn’t want another country burdened with them either.

In the Bible that I read, it says love thy neighbor— not love thy neighbor only if they meet these specific set of race, religious and sexual orientation requirements. Most of today’s problems stem from the fact that people can’t seem to follow that simple rule of “live and let live”.

Think about it — every crime is committed because somebody did not love their neighbor whether it’s murder or theft and for a church to applaud and encourage hate crimes, obviously, they really aren’t getting the message.

This message is a fundamental message inherent in our species and connected to our very survival on this planet. To get along is to prolong our existence because we could very easily kill each other off and have in the past based on extremist factions.

I’m sorry I just don’t agree with Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” or, more appropriately, “survival of the factions” theory because, usually, the fittest are willing to knock you in the head to get what they want and I really don’t want those kind of human beings propagating the race. However, I digress. That’s a whole other matter I could spin into a tangent.

The bottom line is people proclaiming to be Christians shouldn’t be spewing forth such vile rhetoric that is, in reality, the polar opposite to the teachings of these beliefs and goes against our basic rules for survival to boot.

Right below my bottom line is: Please don’t fax rhetoric and call it a news release. That’s just ludicrous.