I mean, that thing I said I said earlier about not celebrating the death of somebody you disagree with… that still counts for a bitter, uncompromising old fart like Falwell, right? We’re civilized people. We can celebrate him changing his mind, or even celebrate him being made to look like a fool in public.

But you start cheering his death, you’ve walked away from the one single baseline every remotely moral person has ever agreed on: the value of human life. And I know we all agree on that, because we can all think of people we could’ve otherwise stabbed and gotten away with it.

And sure, there may be a few of my atheists out there saying that what Falwell was spewing was so hateful, that it surely inspired some murders (of homosexuals or abortion doctors or whatever) and that he thus deserved death on those grounds.

But you don’t want to live by that rule; you’ll wind up in a world where gangsta rappers and video game programmers and political commentators and novelists are considered worthy of death just because some fans claimed their work inspired them to kill. That’s the sort of thing a nut from the other side would say. Right?

FK – I have no problem cheering the ‘death’ of some creature that would gladly send its black-suited Nazis to my door because I didn’t obey one of its evil laws.

This article makes some good points but there will always be ‘extremists’ in all groups. Unfortunately most sheeple see anyone who’s not very similar to them as extremist because most don’t put any real effort into understanding the world they inhabit.

The very basis of the hell story is the human desire to see those who are different or who may have wronged someone punished. But don’t worry, these cultural shifts cycle in and out:

5 Ways 19th Century England Makes the Modern World Look Tame