Today’s blog was going to be about the geniuses who were going to burn the Quran on Saturday but a funny thing happened, they changed their minds. Apparently someone told this pastor that the New York City mosque would be moved to a new location and then the pastor discovered that someone lied to him about it so now they were uncanceling the canceled event. Huh? He says that they will still burn the Quran but now it won’t be on Saturday but at a later date. So basically, they didn’t cancel the spectacle but have suspended it.
I was going to write about this demonstration today and state my opinion on the whole thing but with news coming in every hour today I don’t know what to say.
I am in agreement with the President, NYC mayor Bloomberg and countless others when I say that this pastor and this church certainly has the right to burn it. I will not dispute that. Many men and women have fought and many have died for that right. Now if this thing ever happens I wonder how many American men and women would die because of it. You don’t think our enemies aren’t salivating at the chance to use this display to inspire and rally even more people against us and our interests? Never mind the fact that radical Islamists do this type of thing all the time, if we did it, it would appear as if we were upping the ante.
When it comes to devotion to their god and their laws I can’t dispute that they win. I don’t hear of many Americans strapping a bomb to them and blowing up 50 people to make a statement. Being who I am and considering where I live I guess it’s no surprise I find this behavior to be mad. So while I’ll give it to them on devotion and discipline, I’ll also give it to them on being crazy.
That’s not to say we don’t have a few nutballs and religious zealots of our own. Hate + hate just equals more hate and I really don’t think putting on such a hateful display would help anyone other than terrorists, radicals and extremists. I thought we decided long ago that burning books was a bad idea. I mean Kevin Bacon danced his way to freedom over book burning, dance banning nutjobs over 25 years ago. You’d think the world would learn from it.
My opinion on religion has always been: believe what you want, enjoy yourself, good luck and peace with you, BUT please keep your religion to yourself. Take away all the posturing, divine messages and conjecture this is just another case of my god is better than your god and I’m so tired of it. Millions of people have died in this argument over dozens of centuries and it appears that in spite of Blackberrys, Electric Cars and Coke Zero, we really haven’t learned that much.
There is no right answer and even if there was, we’d never get everyone to agree. I wish we’d take all the resources and time wasted in fighting over who is right and use it to better humanity, like finding cures for diseases and other tangible things. Then we could all kick off our Sunday shoes. lose our blues and get footloose!
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