Ride your pony:
Obama had a more non-denominational message for the audience that also included prominent leaders of non-Christian faiths. The president said that while religion is a source for good around the world, people of all faiths have been willing to "hijack religion for their own murderous ends."
"Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ," Obama said. "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
"So it is not unique to one group or one religion," Obama said. "There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith."
See, you might just have the same simple tendency as the guys who did this:
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| It got worse shortly after this image was captured |
And he's right, of course. There's at least a puncher's chance that one of my distant ancestors stopped being a leaping gnome in the Black Forest and rode off to the Holy Land and got medieval with some poor schlub in Antioch. Maybe Ancestry.com has some paperwork on that.
There's really not much difference between you, sitting in your comfortable suburban living room, and Boko Haram. You doubt me? Pictures don't lie, bub.
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| This is Boko Haram |
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| Burn Rubber on Me, or Burn a Jordanian Pilot -- pretty much the same thing, right? |
QED, haters.
3 comments:
One of the principles of scripture reading that I teach is that you point it at yourself before other people. The President could point a finger of blame at himself for droning or bombing people ineffectually in Afghanistan. Sometimes humans are brutal in defense of something dear to them, like religious piety or political advantage.
A good quote I saw elsewhere, from back in 2008, when the future Leader of the Free World understood the problem with guilt by association:
This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense, George.
Guilt by association is a fallacy, yes, but over the past seven years, I would dare say that President Obama has proven he was a lot more influenced by Bill Ayers than he was letting on.
And this case? I think a real leader would have kept his words short and to the point; something like "all civilized people take extreme exception to acts like this and will take steps to prevent them from happening again", and then follow it up by doing his best to make sure as many ISIS fighters as possible assume room temperature.
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