Not much to write about - I’ve been so totally focused on the first week of my six-week diet plan and so wiped out from work that creative posting has been hard - but I just want to say that the Mass today at St. Mary Magdalene was everything anyone wanting to feel and capture the true essence of the Christmas could have wanted to experience. The sanctuary area asplendor with Christmas trees full of white lights and lots of poinsettia, musical selections featuring many carols all well-performed and with a feeling of reverence and celebration that was perfect in both its setting and tone.

Being the first time I had been back to Mass since my brother’s death in September - I couldn’t believe it had been that long - it was hard to keep the emotions in check. Mark had been the first to convert to Roman Catholicism and I followed him in that way as I had done in so many ways when we were growing up. Throughout the Mass my thoughts were going in a million directions: the carol harmonies I heard reminded me of my days singing in the St. Anne’s Episcopal church choir with those who have been gone many years, the priest’s sermon (around the mystery and revelation of God in Jesus’ birth) was a powerful reminder of just loving and forgiving God is - something Mark might have taken comfort from had he heeded my advice to return to his faith during his last troubled months. It was tough.

But I feel good about the whole experience: for me it was Christmas in all its beauty and majesty. At least now I know I like I have experienced Christmas for 2011 in the way it was meant to be.

“O come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
And be Thyself our King of Peace” O Come, O Come Emmanuel

“…and if Christ be not risen, then our preaching is in vain, your faith also is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14)

—

The season of Advent is and has always been one of my favorite seasons of the Church Year. Maybe it’s because I’ve always enjoyed the bleakness of the late autumns and early winters November and December bring; the days are nearing their shortest and the impending winter brings a sense of everything closing in around you. It’s at this time that the familiar rhythm and practices of the Church have their greatest impact: the colors of purple (and, in some Lutheran churches, dark blue) linens, the candles, and the evergreen wreaths and boughs serve as a reminder that the joy of Christmastide is just around the corner.

More than that for me, however, are the Scripture readings the season brings; just as the Old Testament readings from the prophet Isaiah and others express ancient Israel’s longing for deliverance and reconciliation with God during its time of dispersion and exile, our attention as Christians is the hope, longing, and preparation to once again welcome the Christ Child into a hostile world. We see the increased coarseness and vulgarity of the culture we live in, the incredible cheapness of life, the violence, and the attacks on Christianity and Christians all over the world. The radical secularists of the West and radical Islamic fundamentalism in both Asia and Africa seek to stamp out all vestiges of these faiths and crush them under increased persecution through oppression and violence.

It is during these times that God seems far away indeed, and it is all too easy to throw our hands up in the air and say there’s nothing we can do about it. But Advent and the lessons from Scripture ask us to take a much broader view of ourselves, our world, and our place in it. The start of a new Church Year brings with it the opportunity for personal and spiritual renewal, and a re-examination of the way we live our lives and conduct ourselves around others. By changing ourselves, we can and do, in effect, change the world we live in.

Attending Mass today at St. Timothy Catholic Church (a perfect way to spend a morning while the car was getting serviced), I was struck by the size and diversity of the crowd that had gathered: people from every color and ethnicity, young families, lots of teens (always a great sight to see), old and young all gathered together to praise God and received Our Lord’s most precious Body and Blood. People who at any other day and time would probably not socialize together or know they share the common bond that Christianity and being a Roman Catholic brings. But for those 90 minutes we all worship, sing, listen to Scripture, pray, and receive the Eucharist together, united in a common identity that runs through Christ’s Body and Blood in a way that cannot be measured by the secular concepts of time, place, and identity.

It is in such a setting that true goals of modern-day liberalism and progressive political thought - tolerance, acceptance, and diversity - are actually practiced: not by the people present (we all, after all, have our own faults, failures, prejudices, and weaknesses), but by the one Triune God Who loves not just those who have gathered before Him, but everyone and everything He has created, in ways that are beyond our ability to understand and comprehend.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16

As I left Mass and headed back to pick up my car, I couldn’t help but think that the great tragedy of my brother Mark’s death is that he could never find refuge in the Christian religion he was born into and the Roman Catholic faith he embraced several years back. There is so much hopelessness and helplessness in the world around us. We can choose to let it overwhelm us and drive us to the depths of human despair, or we can seek refuge in and embrace a loving God who loves us without question or condition. Advent teaches us that despair and disconnectedness from God, ourselves, our souls, and the world around us are nothing new: the people of ancient Israel longed for that time when their reconciliation with God would be complete. And it is from those same depths that our own hope, longing, and expectation of the Christ Child’s arrival comes from; in that way, Advent is perhaps the most “human” of Church seasons.

Were the desires, longings, and expectations of Advent left unfulfilled there would be no hope, no affirmative answer to the question of “is this all there is?” and the deep sense we all share that there has to be more than what this life and the world around us has to offer. God’s promise to humankind through the Incarnation of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and his death and glorious Resurrection are the fulfillment of every longing and hope known to humankind. And it’s there for each of us - not just during Advent, but every day we live and breathe. God invites us into the mystery of unconditional love and waits for our response; His calling card is always stuck in our door. God hears the longings of our souls, inviting us continually to turn from our hopelessness, despair, and disconnectedness to find refuge in His infinite love, mercy, and forgiveness.

Through Our Lord’s Incarnation God heard the prayers of Israel and delivered; during the season of Advent we are all Israel. Come, Emmanuel, indeed.

Robert Morrison over at National Review Online’s Corner blog has a wonderful and interesting post contrasting the leaders of Great Britian and today in the face of international conflict and how they faced the challenges of their day. Morrison writes of the meeting between FDR and Winston Churchill in Newfoundland suring the summer of 1941: Churchill was keen to get American ships to help in the fight against Germany, Roosevelt wanted to help without committing more than what he reasonably could without entering the nation into war.

It’s a beautifully-written piece that expresses longingly just how much we as a nation have lost in the face of a post-modern, anti-Christian liberalism that has sought to extract God from everything and everywhere in this country:

The next day, Sunday, was the spiritual summit of this summit. Thousands of British and American sailors crowded together for worship aboard Prince of Wales. “My father is a very religious man,” Elliott had told Churchill in a private meeting. Churchill already knew that. He had planned every detail of the elaborate divine service. He ordered British and American flags placed on the chaplain’s pulpit.

The president and the prime minister led their ships’ companies in a church parade. The sailors shared hymnals. The prime minister selected the hymns — Roosevelt’s favorites, and ones that Winston judged would be known by most of his battle-hardened English ratings. “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers” were the familiar tunes voiced by 4,000 male voices, their sound reverberating from the forbidding gray mountains that ringed this sheltered bay.

The Royal Navy chaplain read from the book of Joshua. “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee, saith the Lord. Be strong and of good courage.” Roosevelt choked back tears, so moved was he by the scene played out for him. Churchill wept openly.

Now ask yourself: could you everimagine Barack Obama submitting himself to such a display of earnest Christianity? That’s a rhetorical question, y’all. Of course not. Do you know the Kenyan has never released a White House proclamation about Easter, but has annually at the start of Ramadan. Hey, I just report, you can be the judge.

I love the imagery of which Morrison writes; more than anything else, I miss the churches of which he writes. The Church of England (to which Churchill belonged) and the Episcopal Church (Roosevelt’s tradition) of their time are both long since gone. Instead of a rich tradition and a beautiful liturgy that presented one in humble and earnest repentence before God, these traditions of today are instead little more than apostate, pagan tributes to the gods of acceptance, tolerance, and diversity in the face of a political correctness that leaves them little more than a step or two above the wiles of Satan and his archangels.

If you think these words are harsh, all I can say is that it wasn’t me who left the Episcopal Church, it was the Episcopal Church that left me. I am, and will always remain until my grave, an Anglo-Catholic.

Few contemporaries in my view lived as full and an apostolic life in Matthew’s view as the Anglican evangelical John R. W. Stott, who passed away yesterday at the age of 90. I’ll let others share their memories and mark their rememberances of this giant of Protestantism, but for me, his books (”Basic Christianity” is an absolute must-to-have), ironically, did much to foment my view that modern-day Protestantism (of which the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the US are among its Anglican representatives) was nothing short of a cancer - not just to Christianity but to people’s souls as well, ultimately leading me to Catholicism and the Roman Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, thanks in great part to Dr. Stott, I remain enthusiastically an Anglo-Catholic.

I first came to know Dr. Stott through his writings on David Virtue’s Virtuosity website; no matter how far astray the Episcopal Church was heading in its trading of Jesus Christ as its Lord and Savior for the more amorphous triune god of “acceptance, tolerance, and diversity”, one could always count on Virtue’s preambles to contain a snippet of Stott’s wisdom to make you pause and think about what basic and (to borrow C.S. Lewis’ phrase) “mere” Christianity was. The sad truth is that, no matter how quiet, humble, and powerful Stott’s writings were, they could never be a match for the kind of rabid, self-destructive forces post-modernism, feminism and its stepchild the gay-lesbian-transgender movement brought to the mainline Protestant churches. As David Virtue writes:

He was a rare breed of clergyman most of whom seem always to be looking for the next rung in the ecclesiastical ladder. Stott neither sought nor cared for preferment. He sought only to preach and teach the word to anyone who would listen. His evangelistic forays to universities were thoughtful, unemotional, rational, logical presentations of the gospel. He did not dodge the hard questions.

Stott was a man who lived as simply as possible, writing some 50 books in a simple cabin in Wales. He never married, and was called “Uncle John” by hundreds of younger people to whom he was a mentor.

When he spoke, it was with firm conviction. He never wavered in the pulpit. He was not a topical sermon preacher. He focused on Scripture and the big issues of the faith. He always kept his eye on Christ as the author and perfector of our faith.

Someone wrote that he was polite, not because he was an Englishman, but because the grace of Christ requires it. “Stott demonstrated spiritual leadership not because he built an organization or led an institution. He led by planting the seeds of truth-widely, deeply, continually, over a period of decades. In John Stott’s final public address he raised the question: what are we trying to do in the mission? In his mind the answer was unambiguous: to help people become more like Christ.”

John Stott was one of the, if not the last, giants of Protestantism. Sure, Stott came from another age - an age where the focus was not on you, yourself, and forcing the Church and others to accommodate you so you can feel good about the reckless choices you’ve made in your life. But he and his writings represented a timeless age of humility and living the Gospels as they were designed - not as a way to further one’s own pathetic and corrupt agenda to the ultimate destruction of the Church and its teachings and traditions.

Stott never wavered in his love for Anglicanism and the unique place it once held (yes, unfortunately I’m talking past tense) in Christianity, yet his writings were typically and increasingly at odds with the Church of England’s (and the Episcopal Church’s) leaders of the past forty years. Who was right? Take a look at the health and well-being of today’s mainline Protestant branches and you be the judge. His departure leaves the Church and its traditions and teachings that much poorer, but most assuredly God’s eternal kingdom is the beneficiary.

Rest in peace, Dr. Stott you’ve won your just reward.

Welcome happy morning, age to age shall say! To paraphrase my Auntie Marge’s favorite Easter hymn (or at least I think it is!), today serves as the bedrock of the Christian faith. As the Apostle Paul once wrote (in not so many words) if Chris Jesus did not rise from the dead, then a very poor joke has been played on us all, indeed!

BTW, I can’t hear this hymn without remembering how fast my godfather Milt (or choir director at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church when I sang in the choir there) would play this song. We’d be almost out of breath trying to keep up with him. Great memories! May he rest in peace with all the saints.

But I digress. Happily so!

Anyways, but that’s where the whole idea of religion and faith comes in, doesn’t it? I feel bad for those who go through life with a jaded eye towards religion, saying, to some effect, if I can’t see it or quantify it I don’t believe it. There are so many things we poor human saps go through every day in faith without any assuredness of truth - I won’t go through them all, it’s a pointless argument to non-believers - I’ll just leave the question open.

What I find most intriguing about the Gospels is how unified they are as far as the basic Easter story, and the central role women played in it - certainly unusual given the place of women in such a patriarchal society then (and still today, for that matter).

But today is not a day for apologetics, it is one for rejoicing and proclaiming Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. So let’s leave it at that. As the proclamation ringing throughout churches across Christendom today goes:

Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

And the most common Easter hymn to be sung.

Here’s my favorite Easter hymn. Brings me to tears every time I hear it; both the tune and the story it tells have remained with me ever since the first time I heard it as a child. To me it was always very powerful, lots of imagery for the mind of a child to get around - fantastically so:

Come, ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness;
God hath brought forth Israel into joy from sadness;
Loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke Jacob’s sons and daughters,
Led them with unmoistened foot through the Red Sea waters.

’Tis the spring of souls today; Christ has burst His prison,
And from three days’ sleep in death as a sun hath risen;
All the winter of our sins, long and dark, is flying
From His light, to Whom we give laud and praise undying.

Now the queen of seasons, bright with the day of splendor,
With the royal feast of feasts, comes its joy to render;
Comes to glad Jerusalem, who with true affection
Welcomes in unwearied strains Jesus’ resurrection.

Neither might the gates of death, nor the tomb’s dark portal,
Nor the watchers, nor the seal hold Thee as a mortal;
But today amidst thy own Thou dost stand, bestowing
That Thy peace which evermore passeth human knowing.

Alleluia, the Lord is risen indeed!

A happy and blessed Easter to everyone! All our Easter rabbits of the non-chocolate variety send their warmest wishes and regards.

Not much to write about today. Me, I plan a little quiet time to dwell on the mystery of Holy Saturday, that day of seeming vast emptiness and longing between the devastating sense of death and loss Good Friday brings, and that wonderful renewal of exultation and joy that comes with Easter, the Feast of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. As a kid, the Saturday before Easter was when we would go to church in the afternoon and bring our “mite boxes”, filled with pennies we would have saved up during Lent, and bring them up to be inserted inside big white wooden crosses (I wonder if they even do that anymore?). On Saturday night, we’d paint Easter eggs. Those are good memories.

My favorite Holy Saturday memory, however, is the first year I went to the Great Vigil of Easter service over at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill in Boston. Large, ornate very high Episcopal church, lovely architecture. It was an unusually warm and humid day that year, and with all the lights down during the reading of Noah and the ark you could hear thunder and rain outside. Very awesome.

I found a nice homily for this special, holy day over at Patheos.com; it sets the right tone in both word and spirit:

Before we rush to resurrection we must dwell fully in the space of unknowing, of holding death and life in tension with each other, to experience that liminal place so that we become familiar with its landscape and one day might accompany others who find themselves there and similarly disoriented. The wisdom of the Triduum is that we must be fully present to both the starkness of Friday and to the Saturday space between, before we can really experience the resurrection. We must know the terrible experience of loss wrought again and again in our world so that when the promise of new life dawns we can let it enter into us fully in the space carved by loss. As the great poet of Hafiz reminds us, we must let our loneliness “cut more deep” and “season” us, so that we are reminded of our absolute dependence on the Source of all.

Today, across all western Christendom churches have been stripped of their ornamentation, sanctuary candles have been snuffed out, and black linen covers or drapes crosses as we remember the suffering and death of the Lord Jesus Christ. For me, one of the poignant memories I have of Good Friday was fifteen or so years ago when at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church our priest at that time, the Rev. Alexander (Hendy) Webb began his Good Friday homily with the words, “So, what have you done today to crucify Jesus Christ?”. Definitely an eye-opener, for sure, but that’s how Hendy was - he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and make people think a little. In my ill-fated process towards being accepted for ordination as a priest through the Diocese of Massachusetts, he was one of my mentors and supporters, and he wrote a very kind letter of support on my behalf which I will always feel honored to have received.

But it wasn’t his sermon that day I remember the most. After the service had ended, he asked me and my good friend Pete Jeffery if we would stay behind for a few minutes. Tradition in the Church states that all the reserved host (i.e., the sacramental leavened wafers that have been blessed) are to be consumed so that on Easter Sunday you start off with all new bread, and Hendy asked our assistance to help him consume all the reserved host that was left in the tabernacle. I just remember how quiet the church was, just the three of us standing at the bare altar, chewing on the wafers until all were gone. No words were exchanged, when all was finished we all left in silence. I found the experience incredibly solemn, poignant, and holy, no other way to describe it.

I like the ending of this homily by Barbara Brown Taylor:

I actually know people who come to church on Good Friday and who don’t come back on Easter. Easter is too pretty, they say. Easter is too cleaned-up. It is where they hope to live one day, in the land of milk and honey, but right now Good Friday is a better match for their souls, with its ruthless truth about the stench of death and the high price of love. It isn’t that they don’t care about what happens on Sunday. They do. They just don’t believe that God is saving all the good news until then.

Today, on the quietest day of the year, we have come to sit in the presence of one who was fully who God created him to be every day of his life–who loved God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength, and with all his mind–and who loved his friends so much that he stepped into the oncoming traffic of death in order to push them out of the way. He furthermore did it all with no more than the basic human equipment–a beating heart, two good hands, a holy vision, and some companions who could see it too–thereby showing the rest of us humans that such a life is not beyond our reach. Whatever else happens on Sunday, here is enough reason to call this Friday Good. Amen.

“O Sacred Head” is one of my favorite hymns for Holy Week, here’s a nice version.

To the left of my work area is a table where I keep all my religious artifacts that don’t make the first cut for my prayer table (not seen, it’s to the left of the bookcase). The table itself is rickety and worn; I believe it goes back to Depression-era times or shortly thereafter when it belonged to my grandparents, and I was allowed to take it when I first moved out of my parents’ house - therefore, it has always had special meaning for me. On this table I keep whatever cross is not being used on my prayer table - currently, it’s the stained glass one I use during Christmastide, Epiphany, Eastertide, and the season after Pentecost; alternatively, I have a simple wooden cross for the seasons of Advent and Lent - plus some cards given to me after my reception into the Roman Catholic Church, a Byzantine Catholic Church litany for a house blessing, a cruet of holy water, and a candle I light ever Sunday.

The candle I light every week has come to have great meaning to me. I won’t lie to you - I’m not the most faithful Roman Catholic in the world and don’t attend Mass every week. But that doesn’t mean my heart and mind aren’t pursuing God and spirit in the manifestation of the earthly realm my soul inhabits - far from it. No, my candle is my prayer for the world at any given week in time. In a perfect world I would have been a monk, my calling being simply to pray for the world. Well, this candle in some small way allows me to do just that. I light a new one every Sunday, and it’s good for about six days. One week, the candle might be lit in prayer for a co-worker with health issues in her family; another week it might be for my grandparents or my godfather Milt. Still another week I might light it in prayer for friends or family members struggling through tough times; another week it might be for cats and rabbits we’ve loved who are no longer with us; still another week for the people of Japan.

This week, I lit my candle for all those in the Midwest and South who have lost loved ones, homes, or their livelihoods as a result of the severe weather last weekend. And in doing so, it also burns in a prayer for protection for those in good friend and frequent commenter Jana’s area of Louisville, Kentucky who appear to be under the gun this week.

I know that some might see this as a pointless gesture, something that, while making me feel good, does little else beside filling the room with a little extra warmth and light. But I believe God hears all prayers in all forms and answers them in His own way. C.S. Lewis once wrote that we pray to know we’re not alone. That’s as good an explanation as I’ve ever heard. I have incense to light as well if I wanted to, but the office area is a very small room and it doesn’t take much to turn the room into clouds of aromatic smoke, so there’s no need of going overboard!

If anyone who reads this blog would like my weekly candle to be lit and prayers offered up for someone they know, just drop me a line at richard0928@cox.net or drop me a comment. In the kind of world we live in, you can never have too much prayer - or candles.

“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. … I don’t know what will go first—Rock and Roll or Christianity. We’re more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” — John Lennon, Maureen Cleve interview, 1966

I know what you’re thinking: what is this quoting John Lennon to begin a post about Holy Week, the holiest time in the Christian Year? Well, it’s just that, since my “conversion experience” back in 1994 I’ve come to know how to, and better appreciate, I guess, the differences between Jesus’ teachings and the way his teachings have been both promoted and corrupted by “the Church” in all of its manifestations.

Don’t get me wrong: throughout my years I’ve come in contact with some very holy people that I would say live Jesus’ teachings in a way that makes them shine above others. Just being around them makes you a better person, and you can feel the Christ-likeness in them and how they share Christ’s love with others. Unfortunately, few of these people are ordained leaders in the Christian Church. In fact, I would say off the top of my hand I can think of only a handful of priests - and only one of them bishops - that I’ve seen as living out their calling in a way that is anything close to Christ-like. In fact (and this goes for the Episcopal Church, as I’ve met no bishops of any other faith), most of the bishops and priests I’ve come to know, sadly, are either total assholes, egomanical control freaks, or dimwits. And I use these words charitably.

The fact is, if you rely on the actions of any church (small “c” or big “C”), or ordained leader of the Church as a means to your own faith or as a way to judge the teachings of Christianity you really need to seriously reconsider your faith and belief systems entirely. We all fall short of our potential as God’s created, and just because people become ordained doesn’t mean they’re without sin or have the capability to live their lives that way. There’s no “magic pill” the ordained take to innoculate them from temptation or actions that make them, well, human.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that Paul was right when he said we all have to work out our own salvations with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12-13). No book, or Church, or church building can provide the road to salvation; for Christians it is only Jesus Christ. Christianity, to me, is a beautful religion with very simple teachings that can oftentimes be difficult to live out day in and day out. Personally, I became a Roman Catholic because of John 6 and Jesus’ own teachings about His Body and Blood. Were I were to find out Tuesday that somehow it was all made up, it wouldn’t change the way I live my life one bit. But that’s only me, and I’ve long given up the idea of thinking everyone ought to think like I do or practice Christianity like I do. I still believe Christianity is the most sure way to eternal salvation, but I know plenty of other good people who have chosen a different road, and far be it from me to tell them otherwise.

Well, that’s really all I have to say. Let me close with this: for those who feel a spiritual emptiness and longing for something bigger than the rodent treadmill of working, playing, paying bills and accumulating goods and wealth, consider making some time this week for a trip to whatever church or synagogue or quiet place you’ve ever considered just poking your head into but perhaps hesitated and chickened out at the last moment. Find a way this week to create an open space between you and God where you can just let go of the things of this earth for a short period of time.

As a Anglo-Catholic, I’d say you couldn’t do better than Saturday night at the local Roman Catholic or Episcopal (or Lutheran, for that matter) church for the Great Vigil of Easter (if you live anywhere near Boston, the Church of the Advent does it better than anyone, bar none. The important thing is to just do it, as a present to you. Go in with no pre-conceived notions or expectations, just play the role of interested bystander and don’t worry about all the dogma and the rules and what people tell you should or shouldn’t do - I doubt God cares all that much about that stuff anyways.

What I do know is that God is most certainly interested in speaking to you in that dark and quiet (and perhaps neglected?) recess in your soul where He resides alone, and where, no matter who you are or what you are or what you’ve ever done or haven’t done in your life to this point, you are loved far beyond the imagination of human understanding.

A blessed Holy Week to you all.

Let me first say the following: you will find no links beyond this to justify anything I’m about to say that follows. You can look them up yourselves - all you have to do is type on any Internet search engine the words “Islam women abuse”, and you’ll find plenty. I’m speaking from the heart here, and I feel no need to back them up with any kind of facts, and I do not care if anyone is offended by anything I am about to write. In fact, I hope they are. And I hope they come after me for doing so.

I can only hope that some fire-breathing Islamist fundamentalist looks at this post and comes after me. Because, frankly, I am sick to death of the so-called “Religion of Peace” that is called Islam and the wacko protectionism being given it by the mainstream dino-media in this country. This world has an Islam problem. It does so because it’s not Hebrews, or Christians, or Buddhists, or Amish people, or AC/DC fans who are killing and torturing women, and blowing themselves and innocent victims up in the so-called name of Allah, or Mohammed, or Sharia law, or whatever freakin’ stupid reason they conjure up. It’s Islam, pure and simple. It’s the Koran, pure and simple. It’s whatever the prophet Mohammed said or wrote, pure and simple.

Was the prophet Mohammed an idiot? Probably, I don’t know. But I do know that anyone who uses his words or teachings to abuse, or torture, or kill, or demean women in his name are idiots who deserve nothing more to be treated the same way themselves. Harsh? Hell, no. As much as I want, and as a Christian am taught, to love people and respect people for who they are, I have no respect nor tolerance for people who by their culture or in the name of their religion treat others like second-class citizens or worse.

Perhaps those Crusaders had the right idea after all - where there’s evil in the world it has to be snuffed out. And Islamic law is an evil that needs to be snuffed out wherever it exists.

This world has a Muslim problem, and the only way to eradicate it is to destroy it whenever it comes to our shores. Unlike the way the Obama administration appears to be thinking, you cannot employ military power whenever and wherever you see innocent civilians being slaughtered by dictatorships or authoritarian regimes, but you can at least officially condemn those nations and heads of states (and, believe it or not, religions), wherever and whenever it does happen.

Me, I’ve long since given up on the gross hypocrisy of liberals and Democrats who will kiss the asses of Muslims in this country in the name of political correctness while turning a blind eye to the abuses of women under Islamic fundamentalism in the world. Perhaps it is true that Christianity in its various states has had its own problems, but at least we’ve gotten over long ago the practice of killing people who don’t follow some particular teaching or agenda.

This world has a Islam problem. I try to respect and love people for who they are. Treat me, and others, as you would like to be treated yourself. I live across the street from a Muslim household and have seen (without going into great detail) just how second class women are treated within a Muslim household. As a self-proclaimed feminist I don’t like it, and I don’t respect it. Islam by its very nature is a cancer in this world, and as a cancer it needs to be eradicated whenever the health of the body is threatened. Those who would kill simply because some stupid cartoon about Mohammed is printed, or because a Koran is burned by some wacko, need to be killed themselves.

I don’t know what the prophet Mohammed might have taught under these circumstances. But if he believed plowing airplanes into New Yoprk City towers or lashing a fourteen year-old girl to death for adultery was in keeping with God’s will, then he was as dim and stupid and a wacko as his stupid followers are. And if any of those followers out there don’t like what I’m saying then let them come after me. Because I’m over all of you in every sense of the word. You are a cancer in this world, and like any cancer that threatens the health of the body you need to be eradicated.

Bottom line: You burn a Bible? No one’s killed. You burn a Torah? No one’s killed. You burn a Book of Mormon? No one’s killed. You burn a Koran? You have a bunch of ignorant uneducated wackos killing innocent people. How do you deal with such imbeciles? They’re a threat to humanity, and evil, and ought to be eradicated, pure and simple.