The (not) best example of spreading the love of Jesus Christ you'll see today

Customers usually scurry away when street preachers launch into one of their ranting tirades inside of a Target store. But not this customer, who got right in the nutjob’s face while he screamed about Jesus Christ, perverts, abominations, and his right to sue any Target employee who touches him.

It would be too easy to (deservedly) ridicule someone capable of so blithely and volubly spewing such vileness and hatred, all while believing he’s doing so in the name of Jesus Christ. I’m not a mental health professional, so I don’t know what the clinical name for this sort of antisocial behavior might be…but I’d wager it’s difficult to pronounce.

I understand the reaction of the person in the video who confronted the screaming idjit, but more than anything I feel profoundly saddened by the video. Here in America, a person is free to hold what beliefs they will…but that freedom doesn’t come with the accompanying right to vociferously condemn those who’ve chosen to think, believe, live, and/or love differently. That’s not spreading the love of Jesus Christ; that’s evidence of what could only charitably be described as evidence of profound mental illness.

The problem is that there are those who’ve chosen to demagogue an invented “controversy” by appealing to the fears and prejudices of the lowest common intellectual/moral denominator. Propagandizing the intellectually bereft and easily manipulable is as old as humanity; religious and political leaders have built careers and empires on the soft sand of such demagoguery throughout history.

Unfortunately, there are those susceptible to such manipulation and prone to believing that what they accept as the way things ought to be is the One, True, and ONLY acceptable way of looking at the world.

This is what happens when religion is commingled with mental illness.