What NEVER to say...

Last summer, a deeply religious older lady was serving in an official capacity at a major national competition of an organization for young people -- NOT a church-related organization in any way, by the way.

I think she had been away from kids for a few years, had been called out of volunteer retirement to serve in an official capacity for this one competition, and had been shocked at "kids today". Things were clearly not as she remembered them a decade or more ago.

By the end of the competition (which ran for four days), this lady called the competitors together and announced to them in no uncertain terms that "God is going to punish you." The quote marks are intentional; those were her words to the kids.

How much damage did she do with her bizarre imprecation?

It's hard to say.

Perhaps the most damaging thing she did was to convince a bunch of pretty much straight-arrow American kids that, regardless of what they might have been hearing about the benefits of organized religion, they now had first-hand experience with the intolerant, unforgiving side of it. The more thoughtful among the the kids will link this sort of rhetoric with that of the Islamo-Facists.

We can hope that they will eventually realize that the lady who had cursed them -- for this is what she did -- was personally deficient.

A longer-lasting impact will be a reluctance by adults who hear of the incident to address the subject of religion at all within the context of that organization, and perhaps in related organizations, of which there are many.

It was certainly a sad occurrence, but equally sad is the fact that this sort of thing occurs with astonishing frequency.