Bittersweet Candy Bowl

First of all I’m going to assume no one here is a biggoted asshole and agrees with Pastor Terry Jones.

For any who are out of the loop, He tried recently to start a “Koran Burning Day” on this September 11th. He claims that Islam is the devil’s work. Recently (only today in fact) he retracted this idea, and is no longer going on with the burning, claimimng that he has made a deal with the Imam of New York, the burning will not take place, and the community centre that was to be built near ground zero will be moved. However, it seems said Imam has no idea what he’s talking about, and that Pastor Terry Jones is likely just trying to save face and turn a negative into a positive.

My English teacher has asked that the class write letters to this man,m to show him just how strong the outcry is againt this, even in non-muslim communities. She also said that if anyone else knows people who want to write letters, to bring them in. If anybody here wishes to participate simply email them to me Miw.Auturu@gmail.com and I will pass them on. We only ask that you be polite and intelligent with your letters, we do not want to sink to his level to simply throwing insults and hatred at each other.

Book burning! Count me in! I’ll bring all my new friends too!


BONFIRE!!!!

This is admittedly not the initial response I expected… although in hindsight it should have been.

Expect that someone would draw a book-burning=hitler connection?

No, just the initial sarcastic response, instead of a serious one

I don’t do serious. Just political satire.

This is ridiculous. He has a congregation of thirty people and out of all the stupid things people do every fucking day, this is the one the media latches on.

Like a lamprey to a diver’s dick.

@Suitcase & Pastor Terry Jones: *Heavy, heavy, oh so heavy sigh*

So is Scientology but you don’t see me burning L. Ron Hubbard books while his psychotic fans shoot at my friends in Afghanistan.

What you guys don’t realize is that Pastor Terry Jones meant he wanted to burn the Koran onto a CD like an audiobook.

I was going to talk about the first amendment and whatnot, but after years of reading news like this, I kinda gave up.

That’s why people should switch from Abrahamic religions to Buddhism. Hell yeah!

*punt’d heavily by everyone*

@MiwAut

What do you expect in the letters, though? Everything I want to write about would’ve been covered by other posts already, such as a letter of outcry, letter prompting tolerance and equality, letter of protest, letter of rhetoric, and blah.

There doesn’t seem to be any means for me to add something truly meaningful to the entire controversy.

@Gabriel Kaxbe

That would make this controversy the biggest misunderstanding of the decade.

Relly we can’t expect anything to be added in our letters that hasn’t been said already, the idea is more about numbers than about facts. We have X number of letters from people who think what you’re doing is wrong/idiotic/biggoted.

I think it’s accurate to say that any Fair-minded person would think that this is idiotic. You don’t publicize something like this without enraging a large number of people into violence.

Oooh, we’re burning holy books now? Count me in!

*Tosses bible, Koran, book of Mormon, Vedas, writings of Buddha, Scientology scam manual, and other assorted religious texts in a pile, douses in kerosene, and lights on fire*

No, but seriously, as much as I think that the world would be better off without religion, burning books is bad, mmmkay? I seem to recall a quote (can’t remember the speaker) that went something like, ‘Where books burn, there soon shall people.’ Besides, you only burn books when you’re afraid of them, afraid that their text will be convincing to someone. If your ideas are so superior, there’s no need to burn books. It’s a bad idea. Don’t do it.

Unless, of course, you’re stranded in the arctic with nothing but a match and some copies of the bible, or something. That’s ok then.

As long as we’re torching all religious texts…

*tosses Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” into the fire*

Ah, touche.

Except not, because that’s philosophy, not religion. Though I really don’t care much for the book either, because atheism isn’t a centralized philosophy, and Dawkins is a jerk who talks out of his ass half the time anyway. So…

*Tosses another copy on.*

It wasn’t centralized but then he centralized it. :|

I liked it before it was cool, damn it! *sob* Now I have to change my whole belief system!

I’ll start my own wacky fringe branch of Islam: Al-Quesadilla.

Well, he may have made a sub-philosophy, but saying that because some people follow a centralized form of atheism under the teachings of Dawkins, all atheism is centralized is like saying that because some theists follow a centralized form of theism under the teachings of Jesus, all theism is centralized.

Blah! No belief system is completely centralized. Every single religion is a branch of something else up until before recorded history and everything we’re raging against right now is just a facet of something much larger than itself. Burn a Koran because some assholes flew a few planes into stuff. Burn a Bible because they bomb abortion clinics. Burn a Kama Sutra because you hate sex. The only people who win this fight are the publishers who are, literally, adding more fuel to the fire.

Black/White fallacy. While what you say is certainly true, and I absolutely agree that the publishers are the big winners here, it’s ludicrous to argue that Catholicism, for instance, is as centralized as post-Dawkins atheism. Besides, he’s not even the first atheist to try it. Ayn Rand (Curse her and her philosophy for giving atheism a bad name in the mind of the general public) anyone?

How about this for a litmus test then:
Q: If you burn such and such book, does it piss off such and such group?
If yes = it’s centralized.
If no = it’s no centralized.
As long as you accept that centralization refers to the book as a basis. Fair enough?

Again, I am just throwing this out there, and I am not nearly intelligent enough to argue about fallacy or religion or politics. :|

I admit this because I know a douche when I see one, and you do not strike me as a douche though this is only the first time I speak to you.

Thank you! And you don’t strike me as a douche either.

As for your question, I have to consider, but my initial thought is that the idea is correct, even if I might disagree with the specifics. For instance:

I love the Lord of the Rings series. If someone was burning copies upon copies of said series in an attempt to wipe all knowledge of it from mankind, it’d piss me off pretty well. On the other hand, if someone was just burning a couple hundred because they thought Tolkien was a dick or something, I’d just wonder why they were wasting their time and money.

Perhaps a better meter would be if attacking some key idea, person, work, etc. pisses the vast majority of the members of the group off? I’m not sure, I think I might be rambling, and I’m almost certain that we agree in general and are now just arguing semantics, so I’m going to just agree with you now.

he’s allowed to do what he wants. The only reason this is even a big deal was because someone saw it and called a news team and said “HEY LOOK AT THIS BIG DEAL THAT IS HAPPENING HERE, SRSLY LOL”.

So then the news was like “OMYGOT, IF THEY DO THAT TERRYRIZTZ WILL BOOM OUR PLANES AND SCHOOLS AND PUPPISE.”

So then all the impressionable people out there said “OH Nooooooo!~” and panicked.

Had no one said anything to the news, some books would have burned, some smoke would have gone in the atmosphere, and some Floridian pastors WOULDN’T have gotten all the attention they were seeking all along. Just my input.

The man’s got the right to be a huge douche if he wants, just ignore him like the ADHD kid in the back of the school bus in middle school.

I dunno. I’d be pissed about the smoke if he burned those Koran in my neighborhood.

But I don’t get why we’re being so heated (haha pun) over burning every religious stuff. Maybe it’s my personal philosophy, but I think nothing is inherently good/evil, and the only reason we view anything as such is because we impose our perspectives upon this and that. Consider the bible. Sure, it has that “all other Gods are false” thing in it, but there are some values I took from the bible. Personally I think all religion lead to the same end, and I take the good parts of each religion (that I learn of). In a way it’s like Jeet Kune Do, yeah.

My mum, however, went crazy over the entire affair. How it’s not right ‘killing other people’s religion’. Personally, though I know some people will go crazy over such things, I’m more than convinced that burning Koran/Bible/Vedas/any religious document would result in anything productive being done.

If people burned my scrapbook, now, that’d be a different story. I’ll get my army (all two people of them) and start a crusade against the scrapbook-burners!