I was going to leave this topic alone, as I hadn't had any coherent thoughts on the topic and Roscommon already had a good post on it.
But this article I just read from TIME summed up my sentiments on the issue too well not to post.
My initial rants about this so-called pastor running this so-called church were infused with a snarky point of view that this was some kind of sick joke poking fun of the xenophobic types who are trying to prevent the Islamic center a few blocks away from ground zero in NYC. I had made the ironic connection but hadn't really fleshed it out yet.
The TIME article does a much better job of it than I did.
We've spent the past few weeks in America pretending that there might actually be a legitimate reason to not want an Islamic center near ground zero. There isn't. Intelligent people know this. Simple-minded people who can't understand that muslim does not equal terrorist - they're the ones trying to guilt these people into moving. 'The wound is too fresh' said Sarah Palin. (I paraphrased her tweet to fix grammar and edited out made up words like refudiate) This is a dangerous sentiment. Its obviously playing on the heartstrings of other unintelligent people who feel the same way. Smart people stop and say, "wait - what? What wound? 9/11? What did these people have to do with that?" Answer: nothing. They just happen to be muslim. So obviously - they're to blame for the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Never mind that 20% of the entire world is muslim. The rub here is that they're being blatantly anti-Islamic (I'd personally just call them generally xenophobic) but don't you dare accuse them of it!
Now to this week.
Suddenly everyone wants to say, "hey world - don't lump us all in with this one small group of crazies burning your holy book. We're mostly pretty cool." Ironic that people weren't giving THEM (the Islamic world) that benefit of the doubt last week.
Do we deserve that benefit of the doubt? Most of us do. Will we get it? We'll see, I guess.
1 comment:
Caboose,
Your comments and referenced article make a very important point: fear, hatred, and intolerance can be found across religious traditions. Indeed, it seems to me that the exact faith (say Christian, Moslem , or Jewish) does not forecast a person's attitude very well. The person makes the doctrine, and not (very much) that the doctrine makes the person. Thus, we can find marvelous human beings across all traditions, and too often, we find groups marked by fear that use religious doctrines to justify acting out those fears. So in the end, it's not whether one is a Christian, Muslim, or Jew so much as whether one is of the children of light or one of the children of darkness (Reinhold Niebuhr).
If education could do the trick, I'd suggest that every member of the world's largest religions read the works of Karen Armstrong, such as a History of God, The Battle for God, The Great Transformation, or The Case for God (a couple of these I haven't read yet, but she's good enough that I can recommend her without having read her latest--they're on my list).
So, here's your great big question to ponder: how do we change people so that they are not motivated by irrational fears and scapegoating, especially if people go to or listen to only those who confirm their primal fears? Can reason cut it? Frankly, I doubt it. Too much evidence that it doesn't from our own lifetimes in this supposedly enlightened age. Suggestions welcome.
Thanks for your post.
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