When silence isn't golden

Jefferson's Bible

Cut and paste. Long before Microsoft, man was fashioning his own version of morals without the miracles, good without God. When Thomas Jefferson didn’t agree with biblical “interpreters,” (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them) he simply cut their words out and then painstakingly pasted together the parts he agreed with. Voilà! A Bible he could believe in.

Seems the “cut” part is still a popular method of promoting a philosophy or worldview today. A school district in Florida is under scrutiny for having students recite Islamic prayers and use textbooks that cover Islam in depth but that have “mistakenly” left out the pages on Christianity and Judaism. This district is not alone. All over the country Islam is being introduced in public schools as if it were the latest fashionable thing for the enlightened to learn.

One Florida parent was upset. He wasn’t a religious man but he didn’t think it was right his child should recite things like, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet. I’m thinking there are a lot of people who would agree. And I’m wondering if their (our) voices are being heard—outside of steeple-belled building, that is.

Many sensitive souls don’t like harsh words and horrible news stories. Who wants to read the horrific details of a popular Saudi cleric who rapes, burns, and kills his five-year-old daughter and gets released from jail by paying “blood money”? Who wants to think of what happens to women who are captured by the radical Islamists that are free to rape and torture their captives?

Who wants to think a religion we are embracing and promoting in our cheery goodwill will of tolerance might really rip wide open the fabric of freedoms and values we hold dear? But if we don’t unstick our heads from the sand and look at and listen to what is spreading more rapidly and darkly than an inky cloud from a multi-armed octopus, we will have no reason to cry, “unfair!” when all we value is gone.

I don’t know which is the greater threat: Islam or our being so politically correct, so tolerant, and all-embracing that we are as deceived as that little boy whose face was so rapt with awe and delight that you’d think he was looking at a great beautiful gift—instead of a caged man burning to death.

Although not every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist so far is a Muslim. Regardless of your political bent, or your avoidance of all things political, don’t be deceived—Islam has a goal—convert the world or kill the kill the infidel.

“You’re just one of those right-wing Christian fundamentalist,” you say.

If believing in a God who Loves over Hates, who offers Life over Death, who tells a husband to Love his wife and her to Respect him, who wants me to Care for the orphan, the widow, the imprisoned and the lost--including the Muslim next door, instead of Kill, Rape, treat women as property, Abandon and Torture, and slice off the heads of anyone who doesn't agree,  then, yes. I am. 

And I pray I wouldn't let fear silence my voice or the voices of all of us who enjoy the benefits and blessings of this country and the One who has blessed it so.

Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you…  

One day.

(If you’re this far—Larry Taunton over at Fixed Point has a far better article than my little toot here.)

Blessings friends, I don't really like writing hard words, but sometimes you have to do it regardless.

Marcia