Pastor Terry Jones of (what is it with Right Wing American Christians who are named after the Monty Pythons? Terry Jones, Sarah Palin.) and his plan to have a "Burn a Koran Day." on the 9th anniversary of 9/11 was one of the stupidest ideas anybody has ever had. I just cannot conceive of any PR stunt that could possibly be more retarded than "BOKD" All it would have done was make the few followers this prat has look even more stupid than they usually are. It would have also have given some of the ultra radical Islamist nutcases something else to pretend to get angry and shouty about,whilst burning a flag or two. And God knows we need more of that kind of thing. Thankfully Pastor Monty Python has called it off, so it perhaps didn't have the whole effect that it may have done (though I did hear on the radio that three soldiers were shot in Afghanistan, that may have been motivated by the plans.).
This whole story exemplifies the juxtaposition between the inherent silliness of fundamentalist adherence to the major religions and the deadly seriousness of the consequences that can follow from fundamentalists acting on adherence to their religion. I might (slightly) concede that it could be conceivably possible, but probably extremely unlikely (IMO) that a creator of some sort might have ... well created stuff. It makes sense that mankind would join the dots and create a mythos of deities who made all this stuff to satisfy a teleological explanation for the universe. So from that point I suppose the quintessential nature of gods in human cultures isn't too puzzling. But I'm sorry - anyone who thinks that the Bible and Qu'ran are 100 percent carrot truth the word of god, is frankly kidding themselves. It is self evidently obvious to any passive observer that they were just made up by a bunch of semi literate people a zillion years ago, and that they are so full of plot holes and inconsistencies, that they make Star Trek Generations look like a well thought out piece of fiction. God no more wrote or had a hand in those books, than he did to the instruction manual for a 53 reg; four door diesel Ford Focus. I mean where to start showing the reason they weren't written by god? The fact that the rules set down in Leviticus are so obviously for a bronze age bunch of peasants, and would have little relevance if reenacted to the governance of say modern Manchester (though I'm sure that even those ancient judges would make a better stab at running Bolton council than the ones we seem to have had in the past 20 years.) . That god loftily creates the world and then just keeps banging on about a bunch of Palestinian tribes. That if you wanted to incarnate yourself as a man to redeem mankind. Then perhaps getting yourself nailed to a plank of wood after about 30 years is a bit of a wasted opportunity. How much good could J.C have done if hew lived to about 95? To the fact that dictating your memoirs to an illiterate 7th century Arab merchant is pretty fricking stupid. He should have waited a few centuries and put them up on twitter or something. It is hard to disagree with Sam Harris when he said that if the entire human race woke up with collective amnesia, shorn of all cultural relevance and context, that these books would largely be discarded as nonsense. These books are the work of human beings. Flawed, often cruel by our standards but the work of human beings, and not some gold standard lifestyle guide by a superbeing, and that is the problem of treating them as such. Humans are often wrong, callous and just plain stupid, and that is why no persons opinions should be considered infallible, as ten thousand levels of trouble will inevitably follow if they are treated as such.
That was the thing that bothered me so much about what happened 9 years ago. It wasn't the sheer brutal audacity of the attacks. Or the inhuman callousness of what these brainwashed fuckwits pulled off. It was the sheer pointlessness of the attacks. What is so utterly heartbreaking and tragic about the attack is that those 3000 people who were burned, crushed and vapourised in the crime itself, was that they died for nothing, nothing at all. They were wiped out for a cause that had 0 percent salience. Nil. Most terrorists and wars ostensibly claim to have some material cause such as resources, or a homeland etc. But not with attacks like these. They are literally killing for fairy stories. They thought that a sky pixie wanted them to fly "the others" into wall at 500 mph. That this pastor thought that the creator of the entire universe wanted him to burn "the others" book, because obviously that is high on the list of priorities for the high lord of all space time itself. I can't think of anything as tragically stupid as killing human beings, or persecuting others - because a few badly written books tell you to. That is essentially all religiously motivated violence boils down to.
How fucking tragic.
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