With all due respect to PZ Myers, I don't think it's about burning "just a book" at all. I think it's about the groundswell of bigotry in our country against Muslims and the collateral bigotry that still exists against Jews.Jones's plan is all about bigotry not about a book and what that book means or what it represents to his parishioners. I'm sorry, but an organization that goes around manufacturing signs, and whose members wear shirts, saying "Islam is of the Devil" is just hate-mongering. Burning Islamic books is rendered little more than an action of hatred in his hands. It isn't principled criticism of Sharia, no matter what claims he makes to the contrary.
I guess I'm a fairly tolerant atheist. I don't care if you read the Qur'an or the Talmud or the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or the Diamond Sutra or Feynman's Lectures on Physics as your guide through your life. What I do care about is that people not promote hatred, which is exactly what Terry Jones is doing. He is fomenting hatred and therefore appears to not have read the same Bible that I did as a child (and discarded as little more than fantasy). Because I seem to remember the man in that New Testament championed some very different ideas.Furthermore, Terry Jones is an ignorant man, who has not even troubled himself to differentiate the Qur'an from hadith that makes up Sharia law that he says he abhors. I doubt he's ever given the Talmud a second thought and much less that he's read it and has meaningful criticisms. He has not troubled himself to think of whether or not he is so self-righteous that his actions impact others in ways that are simply unacceptable. It is the very opposite of what I believe the Christ he probably thinks he stands for espouses in the Christian Bible. What would Jesus do? I really doubt, if anything in the New Testament is true at all, that he'd be wasting time burning other people's sacred books, Mr. Jones.
Make no mistake. I think there is much in Sharia law that is just plain wrong and that offends every quark of my very being and offends everything that I believe in. Yet I also know that I've known many fine and decent Muslim people who are moderate and are simply terrorized themselves by the fact that radical Muslims have literally hijacked their faith in certain corners of the world. Or they simply want their privacy (what a concept) to practice their beliefs and don't wish to make any public statements. Much like I used to be before Dennis Markuze started slamming this blog and its writer making me surer than ever that if his was the true faith that I'm just one happy little apostate.What I can say is that reading articles like this one in which two female UF students who formerly didn't even really seriously consider the fact that they were Muslim by birth until Terry Jones entered their lives, makes you realize that all it take is one divisive and hatemongering man to set the world on fire. I seem to remember a few predecessors like Hitler, bin Laden, etc. made quite a splash with the whole religious divisiveness issue. Historically, the results of religious hate-mongering are have fueled centuries of war, death and loss. For fomenting much the same Jones and his ilk deserve to be shunned, to be shamed and to receive our public condemnation for their breeding that which has laid waste to civilizations for millenia.
And all this flaming and ugliness is about nothing, but nothing, other than bigotry.
Pure and simple.
Not books.
Bigotry.
Terry Jones, a shameful man, got his 15 minutes of fame infamy.
