The Book of Fire, Chapter One; Verse One

The Reverend Terry Jones ironically shares a name with another modern surrealist, the Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, the man who directed “Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life”, a movie the Reverend Terry Jones could clearly benefit from viewing. I point this out simply to avoid any confusion on the part of readers who may appreciate the absurdist humor in the self-indulgent clown show of Burn-a-Koran Day being brought to us by the good people at the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. The right Reverend Jones, a man with a history of Messianic delusions, wants some attention and clearly knows how to get it, and the world, including this humble Wormhole Repairman, has certainly consented to indulge him.

I have sometimes been accused of being a cynic, principally I think, because of my predilection for pointing out the logical inconsistencies and contradictions that are so prevalent in human actions. In all fairness, I can appreciate the irony in much of my own behavior, so I don’t think it would be too hypocritical to suggest that the good Reverend is a douchebag, hayseed, barleycorn punk with a bad Doc Holiday mustache. I’m not going to suggest this though, because name calling is immature and counter-productive and beneath the dignity of substantive debate on issues of importance. Suffice it to say that I have significant disagreements with the implied positions of Reverend Jones with respect to the role of religion in human affairs and the public priorities of decent and thoughtful people.

Here at the Love World Outrage Center in Clearwater, Florida, we have done some checking on facts and stuff and have concluded that an irony alert should be issued. Reverend Jones has stated that his justification for creating all this uproar is to defend the “truth” of Christianity against anti-Christian theologies such as Islam; apparently Islam does not recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ and is therefore a dirty lie. The Reverend will have to be a busy man, since two-thirds of the population of the world does not share his beliefs and Christianity is actually down a percentage point or two over the past 110 years. The irony, however, is that you will not see a Burn-a-Bible Day in Saudi Arabia anytime soon, because Islam prohibits disrespect to the Holy texts of Christianity and Judaism. In the Islamic view of things, Jesus is a Holy Prophet born of a virgin and the Bible is the divinely revealed wisdom of God, albeit slightly adulterated by the impure hands of man. When the Prophet Mohammad took his famous night trip to Jerusalem on the flying donkey and ascended briefly into heaven, the last dude he encountered before coming into the presence of God Almighty was Jesus, indicating a special place of honor for the Christ. Isa, the Arabic transliteration of Jesus, is a relatively common boy’s name in the Islamic world. Why, then, Reverend Jones chooses to insult his theological cousins when there are all sorts of real pagans out there is a mystery to me.

Anyway, book burning, like witch burning, is an old trick which is useful precisely because of the smoke it produces. Motives and facts are obscured by a gaseous cloud and demons are conjured from the everyday diversity of human thought. The Nazis burned books in huge ceremonies, metaphorically cleansing the national soul of impure ideas. As it turns out, the books burned were apparently mostly copies of “The History of the Napoleonic Wars”, leaving Mr. Hitler with a decided lack of strategic understanding. This is what book burning does; it makes us dumber. There are a lot of books that one might consider useless, or even dangerous, but knowledge of the useless and the dangerous is also knowledge that may be useful and beneficial. We cannot erase, deny or destroy any significant element of the history of the world by burning anything; even the ashes will tell a tale worth hearing. Reverend Jones and his followers have apparently not learned that truth cannot be created out of destruction any more than I can renovate my house by burning my neighbor’s house down.

Reverend Jones would do well to look to America’s past to understand his failure as both a sentient being and a man of God. Many of our forefathers knew what it was like to be persecuted for their religious beliefs and they abandoned the nations of their birth by the thousands to come to a new land and find a new hope. What we must all understand is that they didn’t come seeking a land of theological diversity and religious tolerance, they came seeking a vacant wasteland where through faith and determination they could carve out an island of religious purity that met their theological preferences. This observation is not at all un-American slander, but rather essential American pragmatism; everybody knows that you cannot compromise eternal truth and the only way people with different views on truth can peacefully coexist is if theology is kept out of the public dialog and everybody minds their own damned business. It is our social contract that we grant the functional equivalent of tolerance and respect to the beliefs of others only and solely in exchange for the same consideration. We are not obligated to try to understand or empathize with anyone’s beliefs, although we may if we choose; we are simply bound to be at least reasonably indifferent when we meet on the street.

This poorly understood fact is ironically one of America’s great strengths; by allowing us to be inflexible and uncompromising within the context of a flexible compromise, we are able to sustain both religious dogmatism and secular pluralism in a single national framework. This allows people of all religions to engage in commerce, recreation and even have sex with each other without having to feel like we have abandoned our primitive and irrational divinely revealed truths. Some might waggishly observe that this amounts to gross self-deception, but in the context of human imperfection, a certain amount of self-deception is necessary for moral progress to be made; one of the fundamental aims of monotheism is to convince us that we are not animals so that we will quit acting like animals. The great religious teachers, Zoroaster, Mohammad, Jesus and the Buddha, to name a few, all hypnotized their followers with astounding acts of character and regaled them with tales of the miraculous in order to instill a belief that there are human possibilities beyond the socio-biological imperatives of survival-unto-procreation and that the wretched, morally ambiguous practice of daily life was not the only course a soul might follow. The fact that application of these religious principles has generally proven to be as flawed and contradictory as people themselves should be of no surprise to anyone.

So the fact is that Reverend Jones is fucking up our sweet deal with his idiotic anti-Islam crusade. Religion is the atomic bomb of social conflict and there is no cure for this on even the distant horizon and all crap like Koran burning does is stir up trouble for decent people of all beliefs. Reverend Jones may think Islam is a tool of the Devil, but good and evil can only be discerned to the extent that we are willing to look honestly and objectively at our own moral failures; without this perspective such terms are meaningless and the flames of a billion Korans will not illuminate the selfish conceit of the absolute certainty of a small, fearful mind. Religion is often a trap for the ignorant and sometimes a luxury for the wise, but I am sure that the Holy Koran is equally as holy as anything else in this world, even if that is the supreme example of damning with faint praise. I, for one, welcome my Muslim brothers to the great debate, the Gordian knot which is freedom, and ask only that they hate and ridicule in private, like the rest of us patriotic Americans are sworn to do; otherwise we will ultimately have to invite the good Reverend to pull up a chunk of rubble, have a seat and throw another Koran on the fire, because the nuclear winter of the human soul is bound to be lengthy and harsh.