Of course, not every Muslim is crazy – but stereotypes are often true… If I am walking through the city of Chicago and see someone who looks like a bum ahead of me, I make a judgment based on how they look – and I’m very rarely wrong (that person will usually ask for money – while wearing clothing often a lot better than I can afford).
If I am hearing, reading, seeing story after story about ‘ordinary Muslims’ crowding the streets, burning effigies, burning flags, shouting and screaming, trashing buildings, attacking people and doing things like putting bounties on the head of cartoonists (sigh), I of course think something along the lines of: “They’re crazy.” Not every Muslim is the same – but it seems as though it was ‘ordinary Muslims’ out in the streets attacking, destroying, burning and baiting on those cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed!
Islam is not a bad religion, like Judaism and Christianity it follows a shared deity and each of the three religions is an extension of the same story. Although Christianity has been the bringer of awful things in the past and some of the Pope’s in history could be compared to Osama bin Laden – it has changed… Whenever people wanted to praise God in a different way, Christianity split to form a new Church and Christianity has evolved with the ages. The Bible is also written largely as a story, the reader is for the most part never given any commands, but the characters within the book are, so over the ages interpretation has allowed people to choose which character they wish society to follow, what virtues of good they wish to pull from the book and what acts they wish to replicate. From what little I have read of the Quran (I have a relative who is a Muslim), it seems to be written more as a list of commands on how to live your life. It is written by the writer, for the reader – totally different to the Bible. To take the most extreme example: This means that unless you choose to place the commands telling you not to kill above those telling you to kill, the Quran is telling you, the reader, to kill (in it’s most extreme).
I do remember being told by someone as a child that saying “God” was bad, but it didn’t stop me. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, damn-right I’m going to say something and I was sure that a strong, powerful God would deal with me however he sees fit when my life ends, hmm? Do the people of any faith really believe that God is so weak that he needs mere humans to defend him? I’m sure God can defend himself.
The cartoons were offensive to Muslims and indeed they should have been, but the culprit is not the cartoonist…
Al Qaeda are the ones who hi-jacked Islam and used it. They are the ones who look at the Quran and find passages to justify their way of being without showing you the passages that most ordinary Muslims see saying that what Al Qaeda do is wrong… They are the ones who associated your Phophet, your religion, your countries, your men, women and even your children with death and bombs… They drew that cartoon.
