Caught this on AOL’s front page this weekend:
Florida Pastor on Quran Burning: ‘Not Ever’
Terry Jones says his plan to torch Islam’s holy books is “definitely” off, claiming his mission was accomplished.
Yep, he drew attention to himself. And that seemed to be his real goal.
And now, I wonder if those sought to define this isolated crackpot as a representative of (fly-over) American will also acknowledge how many Americans, from all weeks of life and both sides of the political spectrum, condemned his (advertised, but not executed) juvenile stunt.
While highlighting this fringe pastor’s stunt, all too many media outlets ignore the violence some radical Muslims foment in their lands. When in 2008, just such an extremist murdered Moshe Nahari, a Jew in his native land of Yemen, “Saeed Al-Ammar, rabbi of the entire Jewish community in Yemen, admitted in press statements that the community had been receiving threats recently by extremists demanding them to leave the country.”
Yet, this story didn’t get much attention in the mainstream media nor do stories about radical Muslims murdering Muslims from other sects of their faith (recent bombing of Shi’ite shrine in Pakistan).
And while our media don’t given such atrocities the attention they give to a lone Florida preacher, our intellectuals and entertainers regularly heap abuse on Christianity in almost rote fashion:
Attacking Christianity is practically an industry unto itself. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have become wealthy men attacking the Bible. Entire organizations like the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and state exist to sterilize the public sphere from any acknowledgment of Christianity. In entertainment media, Christians are generally portrayed as hypocrites, bigots, closet perverts, and idiots.
Certainly honor killings, stoning of adulterers, the brutal oppression of women, brutality against gays, and admonitions to murder those of other faiths would rouse the elites to outrage if they were a routine part of Christianity. But our scholars and our media masters are manifestly unwilling to confront these evils when they are a routine aspect of Islam. To illustrate complete reality inversion among elites, one television show, NCIS, dealt with honor killing by turning the killers into Christians. The same television show decided to do an episode about a suicide bomber, who was also made into a Christian.
It seems some folks obsess about some crackpot with a tiny congregation because they really, really want to believe he is representative of all Christians, while frequently ignoring atrocities committed by radical Islamists.
Maybe they just want to give a pass to the “other.”
How can we expect Islam to reform if we exempt Islam from criticism?
From what I read on his website, his goal was to draw attention to the violence and threats of violence by the religion of pieces. Problem was that the State run media was far too critical of him and his church to notice much. Was attention seeking part of his plan? Perhaps, but I think the idea was to focus attention on the extremist’s reactions.
In my mind, what’s particularly shitty is how folks on the left and the right sneered at how small the church is. How large does a church congregation have to be to be considered legitimate? I’ve always been aware of “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” Matt. 18:20.
Thanks for the link, but my main point was that the Koran burners are simply moving into a void created by the refusal of others — particularly academics, politicians, and media — to criticize Islam substantively.
Before you get all high and mighty, at least acknowledge that Pastor Jones only became a story because of the conservative frenzy over the mosque in New York. Pastor Jones as a news item doesn’t exist if it weren’t for the entire conservative movement having their fit about the mosque.
I’m sure there are few if any commenters here that have read anything by either of those people – but you should know that they are as equally as dismissive of Islam. They certainly talk the most about Christianity, but that’s understandable given they’re Western writers, and Christianity is the religion most familiar to them and their audience.
But don’t worry – they think all of it is silly, stupid nonsense, and I’ve heard from many of them that Islam is a particularly terrible religion. Not necessarily because the Koran is inherently more backwards or genocidal than the Bible, but because there usually isn’t seperation between church and state in Islamic countries. Christianity has been tempered because it’s been relegated to the outskirts of secular society – if this truly were a Christian nation that relied on the Bible as an ultimate authority, we’d be doing terrible things to non-believers as well.
The best thing Christianity has going for it is secular government, who would have thought?
So liberals are conservatives now? Who knew?
Clearly you sure as hell didn’t, dumbass.
Once again, Levi demonstrates that he has a mind like a stool sample. The only “terrible things” Christians do to non-believers is pray for their conversion. Muslims behead them. Atheists herd them into camps or starve them to death. (See Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim, Castro, Mugabe…)
Also, Levi may be too dim to be aware of this, but when a person killing off unbelievers is approximately 50,000,000 times more likely to be screaming “Allahu Akbar” than “Jesus Loves You.”
And this has less to do with separation of church and state than it has to do with a fundamental philosophical difference between Christianity and Islam. Christianity is expressed through charity, benevolence, and self-discipline because central to Christian theology is that all humans are children of God. Islam is expresses through oppression and brutality because the Koran teaches that women are sub-human, and Christians and Jews are pigs and apes. There is charity in Islam, but it is only for other Muslims.
Secular socialism/atheistic communism similarly dehumanizes people, robbing them of their individual worth and classifying them as “the masses.” “One person’s death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” or so the reasoning goes.
Conservative frenzy? Nope.
Funny, isn’t it, how the perfect opportunity came along for liberals to reASSert to themselves that they really don’t give a good damn about freedom of religion, speech etc. It’s still cool to defend Islamofascists, though, because they hate America too.
Well, maybe you could call it a “conservative frenzy” if more people became conservative because they know the libs suck balls at national security.
Actually, the hilarious thing is how Dawkins, who shrieks and screams that Christians should be banned from all sorts of things, gets all squishy when it comes to Islam.
But he added: “As a liberal I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.”
He supports blanket bans on all things Christian. He supports limiting liberties and freedom of choice for Christians and Christian parents. Why not Islam?
Because he’s a liar and a hypocrite. Also, like most bullies, he’s a coward who doesn’t want a fatwa down on his head and knows how his Islamist “friends” would treat him.
By the way, isn’t it funny that we’ve never seen Levi condemn Islamist violence, such as when his Islamist Obama supporter murdered several of our troops at Fort Hood? Why do you think Levi supports people who murder our troops — for the same reason he supports and endorses those who kill our civilians?
Because most governments dominated by Christians are secular in nature, so the influence of Christianity over government policies are limited, albeit existent.
There are in fact, Muslim countries with secular governments, such as Indonesia and Malaysia.
It should be noted that in ancient Israel, it was a capital crime to worship other gods.
I’m not defending Islamofascists, I’m defending property rights. Between someone deciding they want to burn a pile of books that they own and someone trying to intimidate a particular religious individual into some course of action because you’re vaguely and irrationally offended – trying to intimidate the religious person is the far more extreme position.
Not that it ever matters when I explain my point of view, but I think building any kind of religious structure for any reason is a big, stupid waste of time. I would prefer that this mosque wasn’t built – but I’d also prefer that no more Christian churches were built. However, I’m perfectly capable of recognizing the rights of religious people to build whatever the hell they want on their own property – and I’m far more interested in defending that principle than I am in trying to force everyone to go along with my opinion. The best I can do is try to convince people that religion is a relic from our caveman days and hope they come around to not wanting to build religious facilities on their own.
If you glossed over that, why don’t you just assume that it says that I love Osama bin Laden and look forward to Sharia law taking over the country?
Most of the biggest national security failures of all time came during the reign of Bush and the Republicans. Your judgments about who knows what when it comes to national security are less than irrelevant.
For that first sentence to be accurate, you would have to demonstrate that Christianity has an impeccable record over two thousand years of respecting human rights and fostering peace and love amongst its adherents. If this is only about the inherent differences of religion, and not about world history or evolving geo-politics, that should be fairly easy to do, right?
Obviously not. Christianity has a significant amount of blood on its hands over the years, and its diminishing influence on western civilization correlates to lots and lots of scientific, economic, human rights, and political advancement. Liberalization and secularization have done a great job of graduating Christianity from being a bloodthirsty, war-mongering religion to becoming a somewhat less destructive, but financially lucrative religion. If you removed the separation of church and state in this country and all of a sudden America’s law was God’s law, we’d be right back to enslaving people and killing each other over nothing.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Atheism does a much better job of empowering the individual than religion, which basically tells its adherents that they’re being constantly watched, so they’d better follow all these rules or else…. so long as I live I’ll never understand how someone could think that is preferable than, oh, I don’t know, thinking for yourself? It is religion that is about sterilizing people, about making people conform and stick to the script and not ask questions. You’d be a Muslim if you were born in a Muslim country and you’d be a Hindu if you were born in a Hindu country – do you doubt that even for a second? Religion is what really dehumanizes people, because it divides everyone based on what obsolete religion they adhere to and ultimately casts you as an insignificant plaything to the master of the universe. Atheism is about thinking for yourself and appreciating the experiences this world has to offer – this is dehumanizing?
For that first sentence to be accurate, you would have to demonstrate that Athiesm has an impeccable record over two hundred years of respecting human rights and fostering peace and love amongst its adherents.
Fortunately we have Fascist Spain, Italy, Nazi Germany, the USSR, CUba, China, Vietnam, Cambodia… to prove Levi wrong, again
Of course, that doesn’t work in any way whatsoever. Atheism is a kind of null hypothesis, and one of its best features is that there is no dogma or institution that binds us together. It’s a desperate revision of history that Hitler was an atheist anyway, and a lot of the despots you’ve listed borrowed elements of religion to consolidate their power and to control their people.
Being an atheist doesn’t guarantee that you’re a perfect moral being and I’ve never said as much. I don’t have to defend every action of every atheist in history because atheism isn’t a religion – I’m not arguing that everyone that thinks the way I do is in tune with the creator of the universe.
Actually Levi is unable to argue *anything*
He ‘argues’ that Athiesm is subjectively ‘better’ but of course can’t back it up.
He then falls back to the ‘no true Scottsman’ falicy of saying that the societies listed that didn’t believe in a higher power ‘used aspects of religion anyway’. He then of course is unable to provide examples of these aspects that are so tied to religion to be ‘aspects’ of them.
So Levi fails, again.