Thread:Comments:Pressure mounts against Florida church plans to burn Qur'an/The anger of the offended is wasted

I don't get it. I understand that, in the USA, the church has rights to engage in this behavior, and other religious organizations have the right to protest this action (with neither of these rights overlapping the other in importance), but I don't get what the others who are offended are supposed to do except say some words in reaction, host a few educational interfaith fora, protest in front of the church and that's it. I mean, that's all that the anti-DWOC religious groups in Gainesville are able to do in response, as, I assume, they are prohibited from whipping up a crowd to rescue the "precious" books from destruction.

In addition, I find the offended folks to be a bit daft, since, with the rise of the Internet, the sort of information contained within multiple revisions and linguistic versions of the Qu'ran can be found (just like the Bible or Mein Kampf). All that the church is doing is burning a symbol, and they are hardly engaging in the sort of interfaith diplomacy which they profess to affect by their actions. It's just like the Iranians chanting "Death to America", burning an Israeli flag or kids stabbing their teddy bears and cooking their sister's Barbie dolls: it's only a slightly-misdirected expression of pent-up or authority-aroused rage and demonization that doesn't do anything (not to mention an epic troll that everyone's biting).

Oh, and for the Christians who are saying "nonono we are not like Dove World (or Westboro) because Christianity is about love and peace", what? All of a sudden, all the Christians and Muslims, subscribers to the two most imperialistic faiths of human history want to turn all "Universalist" and "pluralistic" to the infidels and kuffar? Both religions want to downplay the Hell belief which they possess against the unconverted (but which Christianity possesses more against everyone else)? No, please don't make me laugh. I'm an Afro-American atheist who has lived in the middle of Georgia for most of my life, so I understand the Christianity being described by Dove World as being the Christianity in which I grew up and went to church and school. I understand Dove World's Christianity, even without the signs, t-shirts and book burning, as being the default in this region. I understand this Christianity to be the authoritarian, fear-based, zeal-driven mind virus, of whose deity their tender mercies are cruel, which I'll never be able to remove completely from my worldview.

And yet, I think about Dove World down in Gainesville, and the proposed book burning, and I laugh. Really, it doesn't matter that much, and it's not that big of a deal.

/complacent