How is it that people can claim that having sex with children is a freedom of religion? I mean I am all for people's rights to express themselves, but come on. Can we really justify acts such as rape and murder by disguising them as religion? Don't we as a society need to draw the line somewhere?

I just don't understand how in this country we can allow people who are obviously insane and doing insane and illegal activities and fear that we are impinging upon their rights of freedom. I mean that basically means that you can do anything and blame religion for it, it is not an excuse.

Take Andrea Yates, the woman in TX who drowned her five children in the bath tub one at a time while the other kids watched in horror and hid for their lives. Yates told her jail psychiatrist, "It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell." I don't know whether this woman was truly insane, or whether she believed that what she was doing was saving their souls. That to me sounds like it would be religious justification at the very least. Thank goodness the courts did not see it that way.

Or what about David Koresh in Waco TX where his Branch Davidians had a compound? Here is a man who truly believed he was a prophet, but was he really? Koresh advocated polygamy for himself, and asserted that he was married to several female residents of the small community. Some former members of the cult also alleged that Koresh felt he could claim any of the females in the compound as his. Evidently he fathered at least a dozen children by the harem. Allegedly, his harem included girls as young as age 12. The other adults at the compound were told by Koresh not to tell anyone else about this "because they wouldn't understand." Would this not be an example of a person or group of people's religious freedom. Why were these people not protected by freedom of religion? Oh, that was probably because they were obviously insane.

If you look at these examples, you will clearly see that although we do have the right to religious freedom, we don't have the right to use them as an excuse to do whatever we want. If we stop thinking about what is logical and start believing that every insane act on the face of this earth is an act of God, we are not only condoning all the good on the earth but also all of the bad as well.

On that fact, maybe we should just do away with the criminal justice system all together. If we did that then we could just allow God to fix what he sees is wrong, without discrimination and without prejudice. This way, no one would ever be punished without just cause. It would be by far the perfect system of perfect justice.