With all the debate on religious tolerance happening over there in your country Malaysia, kindly allow me to share my experiences.

In the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina, religious tolerance is not a phrase one hears often. It is a town full to bursting with self-righteous Southern Baptists who take pride in preaching love and understanding for your neighbors, but, at the same time, are prophesising pain and hellfire for those who do not believe as they do.

A nice example of this would be a quote that a local pastor likes to use in his sermons; 'Those who do not accept Jesus as their saviour are like insects in spider webs hanging over the pit of hell. At his coming, the Son of God will cut the web and send them spiraling into the flames where they shall be consumed by the spider that is Satan!'

Lovely, isn't it? The saddest part of it all is that most people here share his beliefs. Those that do force Christianity down the throats of their children, and tell them that anyone who is not a Christian should be hated on the spot. For the few of us who don't think as he does, life can get pretty hard.

Other than the churches, the schools are the worst place for a non-Christian. The children of people like the hellfire-and-brimstone pastor are just as closed-minded as their parents. All their lives, they have been taught that Christianity is the only way, that their beliefs are the only beliefs, and anything else doesn't deserve their indulgence. They act strongly on what they have been taught.

When they learn of a classmate that isn't a Christian, the first thing they do is bombard the said classmate with questions. 'Why don't you believe in God?', 'Aren't you afraid of hell?', 'How can you live in such darkness?', are generally what they all boil down to. The next step is to preach, and preach they do. They try to force their beliefs down your throat, the way it was forced down theirs, by means of church invites, notes full of bible verses, and saying 'God' at least three times in every sentence. This, if nothing else, tends to make the person very uncomfortable.

Then they turn to prayer. 'I'll pray for you', 'I thought of you in our prayer circle the other day', 'Why don't you ask God for guidance?' These are the only words you will hear from the young Christian community for at least a week. Finally, the last step is persecution. Once they realise that nothing they can do will waver your beliefs, they start to attack you. They call you heretic, anti-Christ, and repeatedly tell you how wrong you are.

In the end, they have succeeded in doing the exact opposite of what they originally set out to do. They have driven non-Christians further away from God than they could have ever gotten on their own, and it breeds a lot of animosity between the two.

If there was any way I could change the future, believe me, I would. Not for the sake of the people that live now, but for their children. These people are living their chance, and they refuse to see through the falsehoods they have been taught, but their children, their innocent children have no choice in the matter. As long as their parents hold onto hate, that will be all their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren will ever know.

It is up to us, those who know what is really going on to save them. The future of the world is in the hands of those who have been persecuted at the hands of blind faith, but most of all, in the hands of those Christians who are above the hate and lies some spread, and know how to end it.