Those evil Buddhists.

Every Halloween there are several Christian groups (generally the more nutty evangelical types) in response to the more mainstream haunted house set up "hell houses". Instead of the more traditional Halloween fare of ghosts and goblins they have displays of what that particular group sees as "moral evils". So they have things such as corpses with a sign that says "had pre-marital sex" or people representing homosexuals. The theme is that if you do what is in the house, you're going straight to hell. Now, the same people who create these houses are also the ones that tend to get their backs up if a person of another faith calls them on stuff. These same people in one of their hell houses had, as a display, a "Buddhist" meditating.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I am a Buddhist and tend to find Christians (or any other religion) foisting their beliefs on me offensive. In this specific instance I find it offensive, not because it was a Buddhist (it could have been any other religion) but because the group that gets all offended when people say things against their religion has no problem doing it to others. It's a bit of people in glass houses throwing stones. It's more of Christ's followers completely mis-reading (either intentionally or unintentionally) Christ's words. The Jesus Christ and God I read about in the Bible sure as heck aren't the ones these particular brand of Christians follow.

Now normally these types of nutty religionoids aren't a huge problem. Their numbers are small and even "mainstream" Christians tend to see them as wing-nuts. What makes them a problem is that these people have the ear of the current crop of conservatives that are in power in both the US and Canada. Their actions would seem to indicate that they won't stop until a Christian theocracy is established here in North America and both George Bush and Steven Harper are pleased to give them what they want.