I gave up submitting to organized religion years ago. I maintain a religious affiliation mainly to please my wife and family (and to be honest, if the dues go any higher, they can kiss my ass altogether).
Quite frankly, I don't need an intermediary to tell me how God wants me to live my life. That seems fairly obvious.
And that's why I'm not getting involved in the argument over here.
My take is this: If you live in this country, are of ANY religion, and you mean this country harm, you need to be locked away or sent back where you came from. But we don't need to lock up your wife, children, and the rest of your community just because YOU are a racist, fascist nutbag bent on killing as many infidels as possible before turning the gun on yourself or being killed ("martyred") by other infidels.
And yes, I have read the Koran, and it's a piece of supremacist crap that would have benefitted from a couple of centuries of redaction by learned scholars like the Hebrew Bible did -- if that was what Islamic scholars really wanted. And of course it wasn't, because they knew which side their bread was buttered on. (The only reason the Rabbis redacted what they had into the Tanach was because after they got their asses kicked by the Babylonians, it wasn't politic to top it the master race in the region anymore. But you'll note that they did leave in the historic ethnic cleansing bits, just so the Jews wouldn't forget that they were once pretty damn mighty.)
The problem we have in this country is an unwillingness to call a spade a spade. It's becoming more and more clear that this idiot at Fort Hood was clearly moved by his religion to do what he did. But it is the act that needs to be punished, not the underlying structure of belief. Contra Og, there are non-nutbag Muslims in this country who see the way differently than their more violent and unstable co-religionists, but even that isn't the point.
The point is that at any number of points along the way, Nidal Malik Hasan could have been stopped cold. Any number of people had noted signs of his instability. There was evidence that he was in contact with Al Qaeda, but nobody who knew seemed to want to do anything about it (unless perhaps they were using the knowledge to build a wider, more comprehensive case). The fact that he wasn't stopped indicates more of a problem on the enforcement side than it does on the infraction side.
It's easy to blame the man who killed the people while shouting "Allahu Akbar!". It's not nearly as easy to blame ourselves for not reacting to the obvious signs before he had the chance to run amok. When we figure out that we really, really need to do the latter, then maybe we can do the former.
Comments are not enabled. This is my opinion. Live with it.
