Military Religious Freedom Foundation Wants to Distribute Korans

Seriously. An organization supposedly dedicated to the First Amendment, and keeping religion a private matter within the military, is actually organizing a drive to give Korans to the Afghan Army.

After being contacted by scores of our active duty military clients asking us to do something in response to Terry Jones’s planned “Burn A Koran Day,” MRFF has decided that the most appropriate response would not be to try to stop Jones, but to donate to the Afghan National Army, as a gesture of good will and a statement of opposition to this entirely un-American act of religious bigotry, a new Qur’an for each one destroyed by Jones and his followers.

They are responding to an actual exercise of freedom of religion -- albeit an obnoxious one -- by promoting the Islamic scriptures. According to their own mission statement,

No religion or religious philosophy may be advanced by the United States Armed Forces over any other religion or religious philosophy.

So why are they going to distribute Korans? What does the Afghan Army have to do with a single civilian Christian fanatic making a symbolic personal statement inside the U.S.? This organization that is supposedly so concerned with equality among religious beliefs within the U.S. military is pandering to Afghans where Islamic supremacy is the rule.

What are the odds of the MRFF ever distributing Bibles to the U.S. Army under any circumstances whatsoever, even if Muslims fanatics burned a 10,000 Bible pyramid in downtown Kabul? The Military Religious Freedom Foundation -- except when religious freedom involves doing something that offends Muslims. Then it's the Military Koran Distribution Foundation.

h/t Friendly Atheist

HOT5 Daily 9/9/2010

1. "Possible Burning of One Koran; Definite Burning of One Million News Stories" Puts the ridiculous hysteria about one nut burning a Koran into perspective.

Representative Sample: Every day, there are massive lies told intended to incite people to hate the West and America, Christians and Jews. Every day, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and Jews are being persecuted and in some cases driven out of Muslim majority countries with no one in the Western power establishment even noticing, must less protesting.

2. "Obama's Ideological Death Grip" Clinging to class warfare. And people wonder why he gets called a socialist.

Representative Sample: Obama's obsession with playing class warfare politics is his undoing, not because it necessarily loses him support in isolation, but because it makes him seem petty and vindictive, and damages the economy.

3. "Your Claims Should Be Laughed At" Supernatural claims with no evidence backing them up do not deserve respect. Includes cartoon.

Representative Sample: If you tell your neighbor that an elf lives in your house, he/she might not doubt you at first, but later when you still cannot produce physical evidence for this unusual visitor your neighbor will either worry about your mental condition or laugh at you.

4. "Hypocrisy Alert: Muslim group ISNA condemning Florida Koran burning takes money from Saudi government who incinerates Bibles as a matter of policy" There's hypocrisy all over the place on this issue.

Representative Sample: when Ingrid Mattson starts lecturing us about book burnings, she should remove the log from her eye before trying to remove the mote in ours. Oh, wait, that's a Christian virtue, not a Muslim one. Never mind.

5. ""An Amoral Manifesto"" I don't agree with most of this, but it's an interesting argument. Links to a more extensive article.

Representative Sample: He argues for a kind of amoralism (which seems correct to me). He also affirms the theistic argument that without a God, there cannot be the kind of (hard) morality as we usually understand it. That also seems to me to be correct. Hence, since there is, in all likelihood, no God, there is also no morality.

Court Recognizes that Rendition Requires Keeping Secrets

Amazingly enough, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals actually ruled in favor of state secrets and against a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of individuals who claim they were kidnapped and tortured. The ruling is a major blow to terrorist rights supporters and their efforts to cripple U.S. intelligence operations. They've vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court, where it will hopefully be dismissed for good.

Why I Won't Be Sitting on Jury Anytime Soon

Whenever I'm up for jury duty I make it clear that I believe in jury nullification, and that I'm going to vote in accord with how I see things, regardless of the law. Unfortunately many laws are misapplied, interpreted stupidly, or flat-out idiotic in the first place. There's no way I will ever be a part of enforcing such laws. Here's a prime example.

George Grier said he had to use his rifle on Sunday night to stop what he thought was going to be an invasion of his Uniondale home by a gang he thought might have been the vicious “MS-13.” ... “I went around and went into the house, ran upstairs and told my wife to call the police. I get the gun and I go outside and I come into the doorway and now, by this time, they are in the driveway, back here near the house. I tell them, you know, ‘Can you please leave? ... the five men dared him to use the gun; and that their shouts brought another larger group of gang members in front of his house.

“He starts threatening my family, my life. ‘Oh you’re dead. I’m gonna kill your family and your babies. You’re dead.’ So when he says that, 20 others guys come rushing around the corner. And so I fired four warning shots into the grass,”

Grier shot no one, but was still arrested. No only was he arrested, but he was charged with "A D felony reckless endangerment — requires a depraved indifference to human life, creating a risk that someone’s going to die." In the face of an overwhelming threat, which included threats to the lives of his family, all he did was fire some harmless shots specifically to alert police.  

Grier said he knew Nassau County Police employ the hi-tech “ShotSpotter” technology in his area and that the shooting would bring police in minutes. Cops told Guzman he was very cooperative.

Faced by a hostile crowd of 20+ gang members making threats that he took seriously, this man showed incredible restraint. In my opinion he'd have been justified in putting a bullet through the head of the leader, and into anyone else that continued to advance. But he didn't do that. All he did was act to get police to the scene as fast as possible. Charging him with a crime is insane, no matter what the law says. Hopefully a jury will ignore the law and find him not guilty.

HOT5 Daily 9/8/2010

1. "Americans Wake Up to Islamism" Pipes emphasizes the important difference between Islam & Islamism.

Representative Sample: 9/11 provided a wake-up call, ending this sense of hopelessness. Americans reacted negatively not just to that day's horrifying violence but also to the Islamists' outrageous insistence on blaming the attacks on U.S. foreign policy and later to blaming violence on the election of Barack Obama, or their blatant denial that the perpetrators were Muslims or intense Muslim support for the attacks.

2. "NASA Is Running Out of Money to Monitor Earth-Destroying Asteroids (Part 1 of 2)" But there's plenty of money for political pork.

Representative Sample: Five years ago, Congress mandated by law that NASA should track 90% of all of the dangerous asteroids and comets that may threaten the Earth by 2020. Just last month, though, the National Academy of Sciences announced that NASA may be out of money to meet this mandate.

3. "So much for our crumbling infrastructure" It's actually in better shape that it has been in years. Links an article that explains.

Representative Sample: We often hear the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling, but state highway conditions are the best they’ve been in 19 years, according to Reason Foundation’s 19th Annual Highway Report.

4. "Burning the Quran is a Good Thing" Some good points.

Representative Sample: for Muslims here in the US, it will be a lesson on freedom of expression. We are not Europe, and a simple display of Islamophobia is not yet a crime.

5. "Escaping Ultra-Orthodox Judaism" Even deep within a religious cocoon, some manage to reason their way out.

Representative Sample: The accumulated weight of all that prohibition, all those centuries of dead words constricting everyday life, must be stifling. And yet, even among the suffocatingly insular world of the haredim, religious dogma and brainwashing doesn't rule the day. Even among the ultra-Orthodox, there are people who see the light of reason

Burning the Koran

By now everyone probably knows about a small church in Florida that plans to burn the Koran on 9/11. I've looked through various posts and comments on this story, and something is missing. Where are the sanctimonious, self-appointed defenders of the Constitution and religious freedom? Why aren't they vigorously defending the obvious first amendment right of free expression involved in this case, and demonizing critics as anti-Christian bigots? Could it be that they care very little about the Constitution or religious freedom, and much more about silencing people they disagree with? Few of the same people so eager to aggressively defend religious freedom have had much to say in supporting the rights of a small group of Christians who merely want to destroy some paper & ink as a symbolic gesture. Now all of the sudden they seem to understand that having the right to do something that is tasteless and offensive to some, and the wisdom of actually doing it are two different things.

Having a public Koran burning is obviously in poor taste, and clearly offensive to Muslims. But what's more offensive are people who respond to symbolic attacks on their religion with threats of death and violence. What's also more offensive is the best-known U.S. general, General Petraeus, actually trying to silence a small American religious group for fear of offending the tender sensibilities of Afghan Muslims.

I'm not a big fan of book burnings of any sort. Religious books should be read in order to point out the absurdities of religion. One of the main reasons I'm an atheist today is because I did so much reading & studying of the Bible. But there's no right not to be offended in the Constitution. It doesn't matter if the offense is to your religion on anything else. Get over it. That goes for Christians whining about offensive art and hostile depictions in popular culture, Muslims whining about pretty much any offense real or imagined, or any other religious type that can't deal with the fact that others just don't respect their beliefs. The very last thing we need is to give credence to the idea that certain topics are off-limits to free expression. That's a far more dangerous thing than burning a couple of books.

As for foreigners who are supposedly going to hate America because a single radical church burns some Korans, I personally welcome their hate. If that's all it takes to inspire hatred of America, if it wasn't this, it would be something else. There's no reason to pander to ignorant, fanatical religious barbarians at the expense of our own free expression. Americans are free to burn the Koran, the Bible, any other so-called holy book, or even our own flag. It's too bad our gutless hypocritical defenders of the Constitution aren't interested when it doesn't involve a politically correct position.

UPDATE

Giving credit where it is due... NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has publicly defended the Florida pastor's right to burn the Koran.

"In a strange way, I'm here to defend his right to do that. I happen to think that it is distasteful. I don't think he would like it if somebody burned a book that in his religion he thinks is holy," the mayor said following a news conference about the progress of the reconstruction at the World Trade Center site.

He emphasized that Jones' planned act is protected by free speech rights. "We can't say that we're going to apply the First Amendment to only those cases where we are in agreement."

Bloomberg = not a hypocrite.

HOT5 Daily 9/7/2010

1. "Insanity Thy Name Is Stimulus" Pretty much nails it. 

Representative Sample: Obama is trying to use money we do not have and that will have to be repaid by taxpayers to win the midterm election. He wants to throw this money at the problem in hopes that things will get better in time to turn the election around. This simply will not happen and it shows how naive and inexperienced he really is. He does not understand the economy and he has no idea of the actual mood of the electorate.

2. "Peaceful Afghans Protest Koran Burning By Burning American Flags, Chanting 'Death to America'" It doesn't take much to get that sort of reaction. 

Representative Sample: The embassy made sure not to offend anyone and criticized only the dude in Florida.

3. "Julian Baggini on Science vs. Religion" Interesting post that is commenting on another article.  

Representative Sample: although it is true that science doesn't rule out a role for religion in providing meaning, or a God who kick-started the whole universe off in the first place, it does leave presumed dead in the water anything like the God most people over history have believed in: one who is closely involved in his creation, who intervenes in our lives, and with whom we can have a personal relationship.

4. "Liberal Emotional Crack Up" Obama has to be one of the biggest whiners to ever occupy the Oval Office. 

Representative Sample: It is not about race or anger or evil or corrupt company execs. It’s about failing, and then being fired by the bosses of this nation – We The People. You were never the paradigms of virtue you liked to pretend to be, in fact you were not even remotely capable to match results with your overblown rhetoric. So don’t over react to being voted out of office.

5. "Somali Pirates: The UN offers Seven Options" None of which involve doing anything that would actually end the piracy problem.

Representative Sample: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon offered the Security Council seven options for grappling with the piracy problem, ranging from simple legal support for individual nations to a full international court established by the council, the U.N.'s most powerful body.

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