Many of us are tempted to view all Christians as phonies; sanctimonious oppressors of the Jerry Falwell ilk. The fact is that some Christians are decent human beings who actually live by an ethic and do good things for other people. The trouble is that many persons use religion as a weapon, a tool to justify their bad treatment of others. The excuse is that "I can do bad things to you because I'm doing them in the name of Christianity; my god tells me to be rotten to others." More and more the staff of the Pennsylvania prisons is being infected with this type of "good" Christian. Nowadays many prison guards are "good" Christians. At least, they use their version of the religion as a justification for their bad treatment of prisoners. In their tainted Christianity, prisoners are "bad." By contrast, the "Christian" guard is "good" by definition. He can therefore look down on the prisoner, demean him, oppress him, control him and steal from him. Self-righteous hypocrisy is always difficult to tolerate. It's even more obnoxious where it's paraded by a prison guard. Consider "Brother Madrid" (not his real name). He's a "good" Christian who brags up how bad other individuals are. He tells you about the things that are wrong with everyone except he, himself. He doesn't perform his religion, he imposes it upon others. Brother Madrid has control over prisoners' property. He relishes depriving them of their possessions. A characteristic of this flavor of religious bigot it how important material possessions, things, are to them. Brother Madrid enjoys taking things from prisoners. He does it for three reasons: to punish the prisoner, to show the prisoner how important and "good" he is in contrast to the prisoner who is meaningless, and because Madrid values material possessions above everything else. Consider "Brother Sightman" (not his real name), a sergeant who, in snooping around happened to see a prisoner playing with tarot cards. The "good" Christian leapt into a self-important harangue about "devil worship." He seemed to think that the tarot was mentioned in the Bible and that playing with the cards offended his personal prejudices. To impose his religious bigotry on the prisoner, the "good" Christian" had the tarot seized. There are too many "good" Christian guards who use their religion to cause harm and to justify their personal nastiness. These persons are dishonest and vicious. They dress up in their doctrine to conceal the reality that they are simply vile persons. A man's religion is his own business until, like Sergeant Wake, he imposes it upon me and pretends that his's doing the bidding of some benevolent deity. A man is what he does. A good man doesn't have to tell you how good he is or how bad you are. He shows his goodness by what he does. The "good" Christians are not of that stripe.