For such a very, very moral people, Christians don't seem to believe in their own hell much, do they?

Last week, a smirking teenager hit the news with the tidbit that he was being suspended from school for wearing an innocent l'il yellow t-shirt advising students that their lives were "wasted without Jesus." He stamped his widdle fets and bawled (still smirking the whole time of course) that he was being victimized. Persecuted. The mean ole school was singling him out for being brave enough to take a stand for Jesus.

Of course, "taking a stand" nowadays just means putting on a T-shirt or copying-and-pasting a Facebook post; ah, how times have changed from when it meant risking your life for your faith! But I digress. No, William Swiminer was absolutely convinced that this was just a horrible act of suppression. When he was finally allowed to return to school, his father made sure to hang around long enough to find out that the school had arranged for an assembly of students so they could discuss how to respectfully share one's opinions and ideas in the modern world. That was just too much for the control-freak father, who yanked his still-smirking 19-year-old man-child back into the car, pointed a lot and waved his Bible and generally acted like a Big Man, and eventually got upset about being questioned and drove off in a roar.

Alas, his righteous indignation about how schools should just teach"good old-fashioned academics" was largely lost and wasted on the world, which had by then realized that Mr. Swiminer hadn't had a single issue with his kid preaching his lungs out at his peers. Indeed, young William had been regarded as a huge pest. He'd been a constant source of aggravation for his put-upon schoolmates, who were all heartily sick of his constant threats of hell and his harrying evangelizing. One of them complained about the shirt and the school finally put its foot down. Indeed, Mr. Swiminer didn't have any trouble with this non-academic behavior as long as it was his kid who was doing it for his God. That, and William was flat-out deceiving everybody by trying to claim that he was just a sweet innocent little boy who got picked on out of the clear blue sky. At 19, he's old enough to know better than to lie to make himself look better.

No, man-child William Swiminer. You were not being repressed or persecuted for your beliefs; you were being a jackass and your school finally came to its senses and reined you in before they got their butts sued. No, control-freak dad. You were not being fair or reasonable in demanding the school abstain from non-academic subjects when you yourself didn't care about such niceties until you found yourself on the receiving end of hearing stuff you didn't want to hear.

Most of the time when Christians think they're taking a stand, they're just acting out in ways that they know they won't be called on--like that old joke about how to tell when someone's about to tell a racist joke: they look around to make sure no minorities are around. And most of the time when Christians say they're being persecuted for their beliefs, a little probing establishes very quickly that the belief had very little to do with what happened.