Working on a super-secret thing that will take place tomorrow, which I will totally pimp after it happens (or try to cover up, depending on whether or not it fails horribly). In the meantime, check this video out.
Rev. Terry Jones has claimed that his Burn-a-Koran day originally scheduled for today (9/11, in case you hadn’t realized), will be cancelled, in exchange for the Imam responsible for the Muslim community center Park51 moving his proposed construction project.
Turns out that Jones and Musri’s powwow may have resulted in something less than agreement, despite Jones’ claims. But regardless, the whole row is patently ridiculous to anyone with any interest in the actual facts of the situation.
The so-called “mosque” may include a prayer room, but it’s most certainly not intended to be a religious site. Also, it’s two blocks away from Ground Zero — not even visible from the WTC site. However, many small-minded, short-sighted people apparently find it offensive to host a site that caters to adherents of the same religion that the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre happened to follow. The differences here is, the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks were terrorists and radicals, not mainstream Muslims. By the same token, would the members of the Colonial Christian Republic weigh against the whole religion of Christianity, based merely on their professed religion?
The fact of this matter is, no matter what your personal views happen to be, you can find some passage in either the Bible or the Qu’ran to support them. Those texts do not adequately lay out any sort of moral groundwork, because they contradict themselves and argue every position imaginable. They are the religious equivalents of “cold-readings”, insofar as just about anyone could find a chunk of the foundational text to match their personal beliefs.
So, while my personal solution — eliminating all dogmatic religions altogether — might be seen as anti-pluralistic, the folks arguing against having a building devoted to Muslims near a site where some radical Muslims did some damage once upon a time are obviously far less pluralistic than even my beliefs. You know, granted that my belief is that ALL dogmas should be eliminated, but that the people that once adhered to them are perfectly acceptable. Not just perfectly acceptable, but should not be discriminated against. Any such limiting of who can buy what property is overt discrimination, and to make matters worse, it’s discrimination against a superset of a much smaller set of radicals. Discrimination against all Christians because of the acts of certain individual or small groups of Christians is unacceptable, so why should discrimination against any other religion or belief be acceptable?