Putting the word FAITH around something barbaric, ignorant, narrow-minded, wrong-headed, backward, unscientific or just dead wrong automatically protects and preserves it so that it can eat away at the culture and the society like a deadly acid.
After all, the creationists already want "equal time" teaching creationism alongside evolutionary biology. What next? Astrology? Voodoo? Leeches and Bloodletting in medical schools?
Amazing what will "offend" someone who thinks god is on their side and how little time they waste putting their shoe on your neck about it!
When the Ayatollah Khomeni offered money to suborn murder of Salmon Rushdie (not even an Iranian and who was living in England)--the Cardinal and Archbishop of New York, the Chief Rabbi of Israel, His Holiness the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury all condemned.......no, not the Murder Fatwa, but: THE NOVEL and the AUTHOR!
Blasphemy is worse, to them, than murder!
Is this merely a modern problem? Sadly, no.
Early Church Father Tertullian in one of his lofty pronunciamentos stated with great authority:" Any woman who swallows semen in the course of oral sex is guilty of commiting cannibalism."
Do any of us doubt the Watchtower's powerful intellectual scholars--if they ever get around to reading it--will immediately agree?
After all, it was they who declared a heart transplant to be cannibalism.
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Our life is a garden of sorts.
We have to keep the damned weeds pulled or that's ALL there is.
Reason can never sleep. It is our vigilant gardener.
Some of us merely want to coast through life smelling the flowers. Sadly, it just won't work that way!
Case in point:
On the 30th of September 2005, a Danish Newspaper published 12 editorial cartoons. Perhaps you'll recall the international stir.
The stated purpose of these cartoons was to make people reconsider the cloak of fear surrounding the inability to speak out and say anything challenging about Islam and its radical jihadists without being instantly hushed by death threats or being villified as a blasphemer.
Associated Press story: A Somalian man broke into the home of Kurt Westergaard on Friday armed with an ax and a knife. He is accused of the attempted murder of the Danish cartoonist.
The attack on illustrator Kurt Westergaard wasn't the first attempt to carry out a deadly fatwa. When Muslims tried to murder Salman Rushdie 20 years ago, the protests among intellectuals were loud. Today, though, Western writers and thinkers would rather take cover than defend basic rights.
Indeed, all over the West there was ducking and covering to avoid the intimidation.
Borders Books
refused to allow any magazine on its newsrack which carried reproductions of the cartoons.Worst, a total capitulation by religious leaders demonstrated solidarity with those bullying and calling names like "blasphemer" "racist" "western dupes" occured.
The Extremists were embraced as the victims and the victims were excoriated as the bullies!
From Afghanistan to Nigeria Danish people were murdered. While two leading Egyptian newspapers decried the over-reaction, christian leaders took sides with those fomenting the terror.
His Holiness the Pope condemned.......what would you guess? Well, it was the cartoonists, the newspapers and the blasphemy--not the murderers.
The U.S. State Department condemned............those who published the cartoons and not the violence.
The Archbishop of Canterbury condemned......the cartoons.
Western church leaders condemned the cartoon blashphemy and not the campaign to wreak havoc and murder, sabotage and itimidation to silence freedom of expression!
The Barbarians were not at the Gate. They were inside!
The sleep of Reason brings forth Monsters.