I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE!

AND I BRING YOU;

Fire! Qur’ans and insane preachers… (Is “insane preacher” redundant?) You get ten bonus points if you hummed the three organ notes after “fire”…

I’m a bibliophile. I have always loved books. When I found out last week that they were probably going to stop printing the OED I felt a stab of pain. I’ve wanted my own copy of it ever since I saw a television show back in the early 90’s that showcased Penn Jillette’s house and he showed off his books. I love the smell of books, I love the feel of the paper, I love having a tangible book in my hand when I read. I will be the last convert to the e-readers.  I think the burning of books is one of the most abhorrent and ignorant actions someone could take.

I also love religion. You might not know it by reading half of what I write but I love reading and comparing religions. My ranting and bitching tends to be about one particular group, not so much the entire branch of religion. Teresa pointed this out to me recently, my rage is usually focused against “crazy religionists” and not so much the concept of religion. I love the cultural history and the superstitions of religion.

So this preacher in Gainesville should really be pissing me off right?

No.

You know what I love more than books and religions? Freedom. The Constitution of the United States. Open dialog. Burn permit aside, this guy is doing nothing wrong. Protecting freedom is protecting the right to be stupid. The rights and rules are there to guide us and it’s never a problem when someone is behaving like we want them to. The challenge comes in when we have to defend the guy we disagree with. I hate what this guy is doing. I think he’s doing something incredibly stupid and ignorant. But he’s not doing anything illegal. He’s voicing his opposition, he’s exercising his free speech. We don’t have to agree with him, we only have to allow him.

And he’s not alone in his sentiment. I listen to a lot of Christian preachers who say a lot of the same things about Islam. Preacher Jones is not the first preacher to suggest the burning of the Qur’an. Now that this has gathered international attention, where are all these hate-filled hellfire and xenophobic preachers? “Paging Jerry Vines, Dr. Jerry Vines, please pick up the white courtesy phone…” You would figure this would be a great time to stand up and support a preacher who is in a spot of trouble over something you said you agree with. Apparently they lack the courage of their convictions. I’ll bet a lot of the people encouraging the burning of the Qur’an are of the same crowd that gets enraged when they see the burning of the American flag.

I say burn them all! Burn the flag, burn the Qur’an, burn the Bible, burn the Bhagavad Gita. Burn Fahrenheit 451, burn Mein Kampf, burn Snow White. It doesn’t matter. They are just books, paper and cloth. They represent ideas. There are other copies and as “V” so beautifully put it, ideas are bulletproof. Plus I think it’s a little more than funny that these people have to go out and BUY these books to burn them. It’s not every day you find a Qur’an lying in the street, I’ve got three copies myself and I had to hunt two of them down, the other was a gift. So crazy preacher Jones wants to burn a few books, no big deal, he’s not killing any of the ideas within the pages he’s igniting. I understand that the Muslims view that book as holy but they’ll just have to get over that. Catholics get bent out of shape when someone desecrates a communion wafer or that one time I accidentally unholied the holy water. (Hey, it LOOKED like a bidet to me!) Are your heavenly superstitions so wrapped up in tangible earthly objects?

Another point that might be thought about, this preacher is probably burning the English translations of the book which Muslims say are worthless. They say you can’t truly understand the Qur’an if you don’t read it in its original language. Okay, maybe you lose the poetry in the translation but if you say the translations are worthless, than why do you care if they burn them?

Becca asked me this morning if the preacher could be charged with manslaughter if someone gets killed. I didn’t have an answer. I say no but I can see where people will absolutely try to hold him accountable if something happens. You can’t run into a crowded firehouse and yell, “MOVIE!!!” (Or something like that…)  Jones is aware of the possible repercussions, he’s been asked and warned not to continue yet he plans to go ahead and do it anyway. Is this not a good example of negligence? Is he inciting violence or is he exercising his right to free speech? On the other hand, if I tell Becca that if she wears a green shirt, I’ll kill the next three strangers I see, should the government step in to stop Becca from wearing a green shirt? Of course not. Should green shirts be illegal just because I’m willing to kill over them?

You can’t censor people just because their opinions are unpopular. You have to prosecute the people that take illegal actions when they don’t like the contrary opinion. I don’t like the Klan but when they are granted a permit to parade, we have to let them dance. I don’t like Fred Phelps but until he breaks the law, we have to let him be. Worse than allowing it, we have to protect it. When someone with a gun jumps out into the parade of bedsheets or when someone shoots Phelps in the face, you have to arrest the guy with the gun, not the guy with the unpopular opinion. Becca is not wrong for wearing her green shirt and cannot be held accountable for my actions just because I hate her green shirt.

And isn’t preacher Jones proving the wrong point?  I’m sure his idea is every bit as shallow as “Pay attention to me” but he’s pretending to project higher thoughts such as “Islam is evil and should be eradicated”. So if that’s the message he wants us to think about, he has failed. I have a brain, so do most of you and we tend to think for ourselves. My thoughts were not guided by his hatred; my thoughts went in the direction of, “should America be a target for bombing because of some crazy nutfucked preacher in Gainesville?”  Of course not.  Well then, should Afghanistan be bombed because some lunatic in a cave orchestrated 9/11?  Well, maybe not…

This preacher is making some people think about the war.  You can’t say that Afghanistan/Iraq are culpable because they harbored these terrorists, we’re allowing the Gainesville preacher to do his thing.  We asked him not to, sure, but we do have the physical power to stop him and so far we haven’t.  He’ll soak the Qur’ans in kerosene and light the match, once he throws the match we’ll arrest him on an illegal fire charge.  It won’t save the books and he’ll be responsible for igniting more than just a simple bonfire, he could ignite WWIII. But we won’t behead him, we won’t hang him, he won’t even do any time in prison.  And that’s the way we do things here in America. You don’t get censored just because you’re fucking stupid.

So we won’t stop him, but he has just painted a big target on his ass. Every radical Muslim will be out for him and so will a lot of Americans. General Petraeus asked him to stop because it could get a lot of Americans killed. He refused. When some young soldier is captured and killed over this, his family back home probably won’t think about the Constitution or about the right to free speech. Preacher Jones will have become the image of why their boy was killed. He’ll have a lot to answer for. It’s easy for me to spew about rights and logic but when you bury your daughter because she was shot over Preacher Jones’ actions, the academic argument loses out, Preacher Jones has got to die.

And who the hell was the brilliant newsroom journalist that pointed out that the Gainesville PD will be split up on Saturday because they’ll be manning the college football game with 90,000+ people in attendance…  Um, IF I were a bad guy, and IF I were the type to retaliate against some asshole burning up my holy text and IF I were looking for a way to make my anger known to the entire nation, didn’t the news just give me a target for my outrage? And IF that happens, should the news programmer be held accountable for some bad guy’s actions? If we don’t allow our Constitution to protect this guy, we lose a little bit of America and isn’t that what we say we’ve been fighting for all along?

Wasn’t it Voltaire that said, “I fucking despise every damn word that tumbles forth from that filthy sewer you call a mouth but I sure as fuck will defend your right to spew such bullshit.” I thought he said something like that…