Hate People? Not an Option

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I ran into a familiar sentiment on Twitter:
"Sometimes I wish I was religious so I could have an excuse for hating people."
Instead of seething with anger, I did a quick Google search.

The phrase, with exactly those words, showed up about 60 times. The earliest example I found was posted by a bot on reddit.com, December 28, 2011.

Without the quotes, I got roughly 35,200,000 matches.

That's a lot of folks talking about religion and hate. Some agreed with the "excuse for hating people" quote, some didn't, and some were talking about something completely different.

The "excuse for hating" quote hadn't been directed at me, and came from an account that Tweets a lot of platitudes and quotations. Instead of firing back a response, I started writing this post. That was on Monday of this week....

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