The Sacred Cause of the Results

"It killed the craving for the remedy they made you buy"

Kidneythieves - Placebo

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From Wikipedia's article on Koran burnings in Sweden in 2023:

 

"The most notable of them occurred on 28 June 2023, when a 37-year-old Iraqi Assyrian refugee ripped out and set fire to pages of the Quran outside the Stockholm Mosque. This incident caused international protests and condemnation, particularly among the Muslim world. On 20 July, this person desecrated the Quran again in Stockholm, resulting in more protests and attacks, including arson, against the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad, starting a day before."

Class exercise time! Find me three lying verbs in that one single paragraph.

Give up?

"caused" - "desecrated" - "resulting"

Would you say that a bad grade caused a school shooting? That a restaurant critic desecrated a Long John Silver's?* That airlines showing Adam Sandler movies on flights results in plane hijackings? (Urge to kill... rising!) Yet you'll find such wording shifting blame away from the perpetrators crops up routinely whenever our society tries to discuss faith-based oppression and violence.

 

Now, I may be going out on a limb here, but let's postulate that subscribing to a ludicrous, sadistic death cult does not entitle one to any more murder&mayhem than is allotted to the rest of us. I mean, I like Robert Heinlein's writing. If you roasted a few choice passages of Farnham's Freehold (which, given the book's infamy, I'm guessing must've happened a few times) and I then torched an embassy, would my act "result" from your SF cookery experiment? And what about those poor, oppressed otherkin who have to watch their peoples' holy knowledge endlessly abused by children's cartoons? Why should drawing Oberon be any less sacrilegious than drawing Mohammed? Pretty sure Oberon has seniority, in fact. Do you believe them any less fervent or founded in their beliefs than the Sikhs, Catholics or Sunnis? (Prove it.) How many embassies do the otherkin get to burn down?

 

Do you not see the defeatism in discussing the lunatics' lunacy on their own terms? Oh the poor darlings, they can't help it, they have to murder, they have to burn and pillage and rape and enslave and repress and redact and revise history and torture and censor and continually use violence of every sort against the rest of us. They believe in it. Well I believe that anyone playing a computer game incorrectly should be skinned alive, boiled in piss, torn apart by rats and raped to death with your own spines. How many children need I beat to death before I'm considered a moral paragon on par with the great religions, to have my retribution against sacrilegiously bad gamers implicitly justified?

Oh, I'm sorry, I meant how many of the "unenlightened" do I get to "educate" before mass media consider the gift of my gospel an inevitability?

 

I don't actually support koran-burning, being flatly opposed to censorship in general, even symbolic, and I'd extend that protection even to trash fiction like bibles, torahs and korans. (Believe it or not, I own a bible.) But either we're all living in the same society or we're not. Harry Potter was subject to numerous public burnings and other "desecration" back at its peak of popularity (and boasts as many adherents as some official major faiths) but if Harry Potter fans had turned to arson or bombings in retaliation, I cannot imagine Wikipedia now claiming that burning a book caused and resulted in burning a church.

Being a fabrication to begin with, faith fabricates its own justification. Can you not admit that the cause of religious violence is religion itself, that the initiative behind faith-based violence is faith itself? That in fact it exists largely to fabricate such pretexts? What does it say that your "holy" book cannot be held to the moral standard of even a children's story? If the faithful cannot be expected to match the moral maturity of Harry Potter fans, if you tacitly treat the sheep's crimes as inevitable, do you not realize what you've admitted? What you already know about the religious mindset? That religion is inherently and inextricably worse than infantile, that it is primitive, irrationally animalistic, sub-human, and in the long run always incapable of coexisting?

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* I would've said McDonald's, but "desecrated long johns" was too funny to pass up.