A Few Thoughts on The Impending Event in Northwest Gainesville This Weekend

[mrz80]

It's a little disjoint but that's mostly a function of how late it is and how tired I am. This all sounded a lot better put together this afternoon when I was mulling it over in the shower after my bike ride

Comments

[lilfish]

Me? Without even getting into religion, I'm opposed to any book burning. :(

[anonymous]

Having been a member of a fundamentalist Baptist church at one point, I feel bound to explain that burning is considered by many to be the proper, biblically-correct method for disposing of false idols and other evil objects. Had I a copy of the Koran in my home, some would say tossing it in the garbage was not the proper method of disposal. I am not quite so superstitious nor ritualistic in my personal beliefs, nor would I nor my former fundamentalist pals go out and buy a copy of the Koran just so we could burn it.

I suspect that this church in FL whom everyone is so busy hating on is simply practicing what is to many a proper method for dealing with the Koran and well as lots of other objects that have unarguably evil influence.

Randy

[mrz80]

One thing that's not been clear in all this furor is, did Dove go out and buy or otherwise obtain all the Qurans they're planning on burning, or are they staging this as more of a "clean out your house" thing for former Muslims who are now Christians, a la the born again former sorcerer types in Ephesus:

18Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed their evil deeds. 19A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas. (Acts 19:18-19)

So yeah, if I'd been say playing with a Ouija board and came to Christ I'd probably figure that just round-filing the board would be insufficient to the moment, and toss it in the fireplace. But I wouldn't go out and buy the whole stock at Toys R Us just to build my Bonfire of The Pharisee's Warm Hands. :) I lump this in the same category as, but certainly more inflammatory (ooh, I swear that was unintended!) than, buying up the local Fye's death metal CDs

[hawklady]

The lecture I received in childhood defending book-burning was that throwing them away wasn't sufficient because you could always weaken and retrieve them from the trash/recycling bin. They had to be *destroyed* so that it wasn't possible for anyone else to use or be tempted. Giving them away just meant someone else would be able to use or read the forbidden thing, and left doors open for you to access it again. If you weren't willing to destroy it, you weren't really committed

[rhjunior]

The tragedy is that by its very nature Islam makes it impossible to live peaceably with Muslims. Or even live at all, if they have their way.

I agree, it is incredibly foolish to do something so provocative, simply to provoke. (Would that all those who dance around bonfires of video games and comic books had such clarity of sight!) But the fact stands that it takes absolutely nothing whatsoever to provoke the followers of Muhammed into violence. We're talking about people who literally riot in the streets screaming for our beheading because they think a logo on the bottom of an ice cream cone looks like Muhammed's name. A religion whose followers go from "that nice polite boy next to me in class" or "my fellow soldier: to "that guy who plowed into a crowd of his fellow students with an SUV" or "that dude who opened fire on a roomful of unarmed men while screaming Allahu Akbar."

[hawklady]

... as the Christians have their Mother Teresa and Tony Alamo and Westboros and a ton of local Food Kitchens

[rhjunior]

Let me get this straight. How dare I judge them by what they preach, what they do, what their holy prophet did, and what their holy book tells them to do? I mean, you can't judge people by their words, deeds, leaders or beliefs! What would the world come to?

[hawklady]

Judge *those specific Muslims* all you want by their actions and what they preach. Knock yourself out.

My objection is to you judging ALL Muslims that way and making such sweeping statements like you did. Particularly when they are in such stark opposition to my personal experience with many Muslims, Muslims who look at the violence of others and react the same way as I see many Christians reacting to the book-burning (paraphrasing): "You are wrong and shame all of us who claim to be of that faith". The young lady in the cubicle next to mine is as far removed from those rioting idiots as mrz80 is.

To judge that way would mean judging mrz80 and my other Christian friends and coworkers (I've got those, too, also cool people) in with the Koran-burners and Westboros and Alamos and so on. Which would be not only terribly unfair but insulting and wrong.