Saturday, October 27, 2007

Holier than thou

Motes and beams

A mean-spirited little campus group at my college threw themselves enthusiastically into Islamo-fascist Awareness Week. It was a Christian club that brags about its superiority to Islam because of their religion's willingness to turn the other cheek, although the club's members seem quite unprepared to practice what they preach. With all the self-confidence of unreflective bigots, they manned a booth on the quad and handed out literature on the inferiority of Islam relative to Christianity. No one considered that signs calling Muhammad a pedophile and Islam a religion of death might give the lie to their own Christian practice.

Some of them had evidently trolled David Horowitz's website for some nice slurs on the religion of Muslims. Folks who cheerfully profess that the entire Bible is the inerrant word of God eagerly cherry-picked the Qur'an and other sacred Muslim writings for examples of Islam's iniquity. Their pamphlets drew special attention to Aisha, Muhammad's child bride, using the standards of today to accuse Islam's prophet of child molestation. Nice work, kids. By contrast, according to the Christian club's pamphlet, Christianity protects children. Surely no one would dare contradict this statement by, say, actually plucking out Bible verses and quoting them. Right?
And [Elisha] turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. (2 Kings 2:24)
Of course, these forty-two “little children” deserved to be torn apart. They had mocked Elisha's bald head, an unquestionable capital crime. The God of the Bible occasionally found it appropriate to slay innocent children as well:
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. (1 Samuel 15:3)
But this is Old Testament. Not fair, right? Christians can make excuses that the bloody-minded deity of the Hebrew Bible has been supplanted in their faith by his milder semi-mortal son.

Okay, then, let's see what Jesus has to say:
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. (Matthew 10:34)
Sounds pretty violent for a statement from the Prince of Peace, doesn't it? This is the fellow who also said:
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)
Still want to say that Christianity is a religion of peace?

The apologists will say these verses are taken out of context. Yeah. Remember that the next time you figure you're an expert on Islam, okay? Okay?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is truly sad that college students, who you would normally think could reason, would uncritically believe this message and try to pass it on to others. I hope there are students at your school that are smart enough to walk away and reject this kind of blind hate.

Anonymous said...

It's been said that colleges are storehouses of knowledge. Each year a new class comes in and brings a little knowledge. Each year a class leaves and takes nothing with it. And knowledge accumulates.