Protest Day seems to have passed without major incident. I heard third-hand that there were more cops than protesters. You don’t mess with the NYPD.
I haven’t heard crowd estimates, but Poison Pam is claiming 40,000 attendees for her side. Applying the standard hyperbole:reality formula for wingnut crowd estimate claims, that puts the actual number at somewhere between 12 and 30. I assume there may have been a few more people than that, though.
Corey, a retired high schoolteacher from Ossining, was looking for the anti-Islamic center protest that was to be held two blocks away. He carried a sign that read: “Christ turned the other cheek. Muhammad never did. He beheaded instead.”
So, Mr. Corey, whose example do we then choose to follow — Christ’s or Muhammad’s? I’m not seeing much cheek-turning there, or among the so-called conservative “Christians” who stood around in front of the White House tearing pages out of Q’rans. At least they read the pages before tearing them, which is more than they seem to do with their Gospels.
To people who quote the Old Testament more than the New Testament, there is little confusion. G*d is a god of vengence who does not turn his cheek. For all their calling on the name of Jesus, they don’t quote him all that much. They are much more comfortable with the older sky god.
Corey is probably in favor of bombing people in the name of the Christ who was non-violent. and he doesn’t see the contradiction.
I’m just one of those stupid people who don’t believe that religion or Islam is responsible for 9/11. For some quirk in my thinking I believe 9/11 was solely politically motivated, and the fact that they were all Muslims is diversionary in understanding, and of a lesser importance..They were all males also,why didn’t we declare war on males? So you can imagine my frustration when I hear speakers at 9/11 memorial rallies telling the crowds that we must never forget the lessons of 9/11 when to my distorted mind we never learned, or understood them in the first place.
Maybe I should just pray to our heavenly father,the Lord Jesus, to increase my understanding and help me get my head right by showing me mine enemy….. the wickedness of Islam.
Theological Confusion? Wouldn’t that be considered the reciprocal of an oxymoron? Redundant?…a compound synonym?
Christ himself wasn’t nonviolent; if we assume the identity of the trinity, then he’s not just violent, he’s ultraviolent (see, eg: the old testament; damning everyone to hell that doesn’t follow him)
“Christ turned the other cheek, Mohammed never did”
This seems to be a recurring theme in many arguements,”just try to cross the border into North Korea, they’ll shoot you dead”, “they’d chop off your hands for stealing in Saudi Arabia”.
My fave is “they stone women to death for adultury”, most “red blooded Americans” might fantasize shooting the woman,hiring a hit man, or running her down with a pick up truck.Maybe having a Hellfire missile take the bitch and her boyfriend out but stoning is so over the top.
It appears that we are being pushed towards a war with Islam by that certain group.(That certain group being Canadians, I mean NeoCons) If all Muslims are evil and want to kill us, it will be easier to invade Muslim lands and take their resources. Of course, this would explain why we have spent about a trillion bucks in “Operation Iraqi Liberation”;OOPS, I mean” Operation Iraqi Freedom”( can’t touch that oil……)
What fun is there in turning the other cheek or foregiving?
Begatting (but only with a woman who is also your wife – or one of them, since that’s ok in the book).
Cleaving.
Smiting.
Stoning.
Revenging.
Now dat’s where the action’s at. I wan’ me some a dat!
Wait a minute – our priorities are all wrong.
How’s Miss Lucy?
Swami: I’m just one of those stupid people who don’t believe that religion or Islam is responsible for 9/11. For some quirk in my thinking I believe 9/11 was solely politically motivated, and the fact that they were all Muslims is diversionary in understanding…
I haven’t thought about the group of hijackers much but I guess I agree with you that it wasn’t a religious thing to them. More political, with national pride and economics thrown in. A mosque — or church or other place in the absence of bars and pool halls and such — is a good place to recruit people to your cause. Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation has often used church congregations as the base for organizing communities because that is where the regular people are, the people who you want to educate about politics and get them involved in their communities. (In the early 1980s I was a member of Lutheran congregation who took the Industrial Areas Foundation training.)
How is Miss Lucy feeling?
Miss Lucy is a bit perkier today. She is eating a little and wants some attention now and then.
Guess I better read the Koran; I didn’t know Mohammed beheaded people. I know he had 4 wives, which seems a better use of one’s free time…..
The perpetrators of 9/11 were not only all men; but, they were all from Saudi Arabia.
Juan Cole has an excellent post on Bin Laden and his position as it relates to Islamic Law and the Qur’an. It is an eye opener for anyone willing to learn.
It is an eye opener for anyone willing to learn.
If they ain’t learned by now.. they ain’t never gonna learn! The reason being is that it’s so much tidier to lump all efforts at thinking into one neat ball that’s easily digestible and fuels the emotions. “They hate us for our freedoms”…But don’t bother to ask who exactly they is…just look as far as an easily discernible common characteristic and consider that to be they. I’m still partial to George Bush’s broad classification of naming everybody you kill as an evildoer. It makes it so much easier than having to assign all your victims to a specific category like : insurgent, al-qaida,Taliban, goat herder, civilian, wedding party attendee, Pakistani family, kurd, Bathist, Pashtun, or whatever of a hundred possible categories of victims.
God so loved the world that he gave us George Bush for a President. Joke 3:16
Come on Swami, evil doer is an excellent label for enemy casualties, I mean it’s not like we have a history of “colateral damage”. Your right though it makes messes eaiser to clean like whenever a palistinian gets killed by the IDF, if the media just refers to them as gunman then a detailed accounting of the “incident” seems unnessesary, I mean he/she was a gunman, it implies the killing was in self defense, why make things more complicated with actual details.
Sometimes the justification gets extremely tortuous. People’s lives are terminated because they lived “in a house next to suspected militants”. But the sound bite contains enough of the active buzz words to press the proper buttons, as so we can all have a good night’s sleep.
This video has a dihttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skudTktwnQEsturbing quality. Most would find some excuse to turn it off. But, it describes the formation of the political entity that lead us down a very nasty road. Also watch “Century of the Self” by the same documentarian, Adam Curtis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skudTktwnQE
I am glad Miss Lucy is feeling better. My better, smarter half and I were just dicussing our current project, Lakshimi, who presented one day with a gamey leg. This would be certain death in the chicken world. So I scooped her up and we did something we imagined to be P.T. for her. Now she is living in our solarium. Her gamey leg has made remarkable progress and she seems on the common development curve.
Animals engage us because “life” engages us. There is some common non-anthropomophic element that we truly share. Life wants to continue to be. Our little chick who only wants to learn how to be, and those precious beings who want to continue in their established place have evidenced some special aspect of life. There is some commonality that enriches us both.
goatherd..Very interesting and informative videos.