[Leica] OT: Koran Desecrations at Gitmo

[msmall at aya.yale.edu (Marc James Small)]

At 09:53 PM 6/8/05 -0400, B. D. Colen wrote:
>Absolutely true. The only problem is that Muslims apparently belief that the
>Koran is the word of Allah  in a literal sense, and that to disrespect it is
>to disrespect Allah. I may consider this more than a bit goofy, but then so
>might be believing in a person who literally rose from the dead, no? When it
>comes to religion, anything, it seems, goes. ;-)

BD

To be fair, the Christian writing this missive believes the Bible to be the
literal word of God, and many Jews hold the Old Testament in the same
regard (pace, the Talmud, which is a most fascinating study in its own
right, a discursus developed over more than a millenium and with echoes
back to scholarly thought far older).  I have read the Bible -- both the
Christian Bible (the one including the apocripha), the Jewish Bible (the
Christian Old Testament), and the Koran, and I cannot claim to be a master
of any of these works:  as Isaac Asimov noted, holy writings are simply
greater than the readers of the texts.  (Asimov, incidentally, was a
pronounced atheist and humanist, though he was extremely well read in
religious literature and wrote a number of books on Biblical discursus.  I
muffed the best chance I ever had of meeting him in the flesh, at the 1960
World Science Fiction Convention, as I was distracted by having my volume
of ROCKETS, MISSILES, AND SPACE TRAVEL autographed by Willy Ley, who TOLD
me to go speak to "those guys over there", those guys being Heinlein, de
Camp, and Asimov, but I, ?tate 10, was too star-struck to do anything of
the sort.  And if I had, I'd have spoken with Heinlein, many of whose books
I'd read, but, at that time, de Camp and Asimov were not even words to me.
<sigh> )

So, yes, the Bible is the literal word of God to me as the Koran is to most
followers of Islam.  I anticipate that they will treat the Bible with
respect (though, as Augustine of Hippo noted, derogation of the text does
not diminish the efficacy of the text itself) and that we shall do the same
with the Koran.

And there is NOT an inhibition in the Koran against alcohol:  there is a
direct order, however, not to drink date wine, which is a natural, as date
wine conains a lot of Methanol (wood alcohol) due to the presence of woody
pulp in dates.  And, there is no prohibition of alcohol in either the Old
or New Testaments though there are repeated charges against gluttony,
license, and excess.  And, for that matter, I have long considered buying
vanity plates which state "I TIM 5:23":  "Drink no longer water but use a
little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmitiies.

? am sick of the religious bigots, of whatever stripe, who take a single
verse of religious text and use that to pound out a political point -- and
this condemnattion rails against John Danforth, and Aschcroft, and Marin
Luther King, Jr, and the current crop of USian religious broadcasters.  

Sorry for seeming gruff, but I live at the fringes of the Bible Belt.  To
be honest, I live in a bit of a caroom of the Bible Belt, as there is more
of it to the North of me than to the South.

Marc

msmall@aya.yale.edu 
Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!

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