Dear Friend dianaiad: What would you have me do to help that? I am not the one with the fears, nor I am the one who sees any of it an an insult. This is a challenge being faced between people who have chosen to call themselves Muslims and people who have chosen to call themselves Christians. Your God is only calling all of you His children. The fact that you all have divided one another is the handiwork of people,not the One all of you profess to be children of. Focus on that and it could all go away.
Sufjon, it is not I who “see the insult.” It is the Muslims who are proposing this who see it as an insult. if they were not doing so specifically as an insult, then they would have chosen another building, or another date to dedicate it.
I am not ‘fearful,’ --the odds of having Muslim extremism actually endanger me or my loved ones is pretty low. I know quite a few Muslims in my neighborhood, as well, and they share my opinions in this matter. The problem is, Muslim extremist/terrorists are all about causing fear; that’s the specific purpose OF terrorism, after all, hence the name.
The thing is, sir, we are well aware that if a Muslim nation refused to allow a Christian group to build a church near the site of a military bombing, no Christian is going to strap on a bomb vest and blow up airplanes or shopping centers in protest, killing hundreds of innocent people. No Christian group is going to issue a …'fatwa" we don’t even have a WORD for that concept.
But Muslims will. That’s not paranoia and fear–that’s fact.They have a history of doing this, a specific doctrine that encourages it, and they continue to do it, and advocated it, even as I write this. As to being ‘fearful,’ true courage isn’t measured by the absence of fear, but what you do in spite of it. A fearless man in the face of danger isn’t courageous–he’s stupid.
As to that…do you know who the truly courageous are? They are not the ‘knights’ or well armed soldiers who go into battle, well armed and armored–though they may certainly be courageous. The most courage, though, is exhibited by the guy who stays home and defends himself and his home with a pitchfork; the wife who sends her husband and children off to war and simply deals with life; the people who, in the midst of war, go fishing anyway.
People who, when they see a group about to issue an insult as utterly huge as this one would be—and made so because those who are about to make it are doing it in the full knowledge that it IS an insult–that being rather the purpose of the excercise, protest it and point out that, hey, we see what you are doing and we don’t LIKE it—
They are courageous, because they are very aware that, unlike Christians in a similar situation, Muslim extremists don’t see any problem at all with killing people who object.
