Megan, I see your position, but I must reiterate that I am not directing this message at Christians alone. I am, like you, making a statement.

1. It is not fair to any religion to play a “pissing contest” with which religion has been violated more. I added that speculation to make whoever reads it try to imagine a religious violation hypothetically greater than their own.

2. If the Church dictates your religious life, what are you getting out of the religion besides blindly following the decrees of a man and not engaging religion yourself?

3. I was focusing on religious tolerance. I know it seems like I don’t care about Christian violations, but I do. However, this country is populated with the majority religion being Christianity. Not many people fully understand Islam, so I found this as an opportunity to show that we all suffer from religious intolerance.

Thank you for your thoughts, though. I’m glad that you care about these issues. The way you feel about the desecrations of Mary is the way Muslims feel about these incidents. We all suffer from this same disrespect. Our calling is to end this suffering through religious dialogue (which is what we are doing right now).

Evan, you misunderstand me, dear. I was not trying to turn this into a political football. And I certainly don’t think that mistreating the Quran serves as any sort of retaliation for past mistreatment of Christian religious symbols - that would be wrong on many, many levels. I was only pointing out the sheer hypocrisy that I see in our culture: to desecrate an object important to the Muslim religion constitutes a hate crime, but to desecrate a symbol of Christianity is ART. As to your comment that desecrating, say, an image of the Virgin Mary is not on par with desecrating the Quran. Actually, Catholics regard Mary as literally our own spiritual mother. I know that it’s a weird sort of system, but Catholics regard Mary as our most direct line of intercession to Christ, as a guide and guardian. We regard Mary as almost literally on par with our own birth mothers. Catholic women also view Mary as our standard for what a woman of God should be. The desecration of her image is quite literally painful to me in the same way that I imagine the desecration of the Quran would be to a practicing Muslim. Notice: I never said, never thought for one minute that the desecration of the Quran isn’t a terrible thing. I just don’t understand why the same people who are so excited to see the symbols of my faith desecrated go nuts when the same things happen to a Quran. As to how the connection you made between this and the Catholic Church’s denial of the Eucharist to John Kerry and to other pro-choice politicians. There’s a thing that exists in the human soul and in the rights of a United States citizen that we like to call “freedom of conscience.” The nice, though sometimes annoying thing about Christianity is that if one is free to join any particular sect of it that he chooses. Christianity is a very large tent. If John Kerry, or anyone else, can’t live by the standard set by one particular church, then he is free to join whichever one tickles his fancy. The people are not the standard. The Church is the standard. The Church sets forth the standards for a Christian life as the CHurch sees them. If we can’t abide by that, then we’re perfectly free to bail out and go find a code that we can live by. The Church has a perfect right to deny a sacrament to someone who doesn’t live by it’s most basic standards. And for the record, I never started out trying to pick a fight with anyone. I’m just calling things as I see them, and what I see right now is that it’s perfectly acceptable - even fashionable - to degrade the Christian faith. It seems to me that the last socially acceptable prejudice left in America is prejudice against Christians. I defy you to read through an entire issue of a major newspaper without running across at least one reference to Christians as intolerant extremists hovering out on the lunatic fringe. You can’t do it - I’d bet money on it. You know me. We’ve talked. Do you think I’m intolerant or an extremist? I think it’d be a lot easier to reach out if the very people I’m reaching out to didn’t think that I was a wacko.

Megan, this is not a political rant. Very few of my posts are intended to make cracks on any political paradigm. This was meant to be more of a social commentary. True, the government may have funded desecrations of Christian icons (which is not the same in a social context as the Qu’ran, whereas the Qu’ran is viewed as the word of God), but that doesn’t make it right.

Two wrongs do not make a right. If you got beat up by Peter and you take it out on Paul, you’re still going to jail. It seemed like you were getting defensive about this post. I am not a Christ-bashing non-conforming anarchist. I posted this to give an idea to people that don’t seem to grasp the gravity of the situation because they don’t fully understand the social contexts.

Any faith can be twisted to fit certain political agendas. Denying communion for those who vote for Kerry is one example. Twisting the Qu’ran to fit the political agendas of terrorism is wrong also. Being a Christian does not make one free from any reproach.

I am not blaming you or your pastor or any church-goer for those atrocious actions; however, I am challenging everyone who reads this to think. Think about how you felt about the desecration of Mary and Jesus. I cannot speak for any Muslim, but I know through dialogue with the Muslim faith that they feel similar to how you feel: violated.

Now, act. I don’t mean that you should join Amnesty. I mean make people more aware of the situation. Stop the religious bickering. Challenge people’s preconceptions. We must work as believers, as Christians, as PEOPLE to ease religious tensions and learn to embrace religious differences.

Evan, Glad to see that you keeping up; I always love people who actually care about what’s going on, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them. I will not try to deny or defend what’s happening with the Quran - I know it’s happening, and even though it’s not outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, I don’t believe it’s an option practically or morally. That being said, I see a really interesting parallel between this situation and one that played out five to ten years ago. In short, the National Endowment for the Arts, an arm of the federal government that my tax dollars pay for, sponsored several pieces of art that I as a practicing Catholic-Protestant mutt find absolutely reprehenshible. 1. An image of Mary the Virgin Mother of God pasted on a background of women’s vaginas cut from porn magazines and smeared with elephant dung, entitled “The Holy Virgin Mary.” 2. An image of Jesus Christ immersed in a jar of the artist’s urine. Both of these pieces were displayed at the taxpayer-funded Brooklyn Museum. Rudy Giuliani went nuts over this, along with, well, a lot of America once it got out. He threatened to pull funding from the museum unless they canceled the exhibit, and the most polite term that the left used to describe him was “insensitive intolerant bigot.” I certainly believe that the artists have a right to produce whtever they wanted - I think that without the First Amendment I’d have been jailed a very long time ago. However, I don’t think the First Amendment forces me to subsidize speech that is openly offensive to my beliefs. So I really don’t understand why the same people who think that the federal government should fund the desecration of Christian religious symbols are so angry to see the Quran abused. Are some faiths more deserving of protection than others? When did it become acceptable - even encouraged - to abuse the values of Christians? (Before you answer that, remember that neither I nor my parents nor the pastor of any church I’ve ever attended were responsible for the Crusades, the Inquistion, the Salem witch trials, et cetera.)

I completely believe that they disrespected the Koran. I can’t believe that it was being labeled as a false accusation. There were eye-witness accounts! Two of them weren’t even Arab, they were British! Besides, those “interrogators” are using sexual torture and all sorts of sick, crazy shit. Kicking around the Koran doesn’t seem too outrageous. It seems rather small in comparison, don’t you think? I mean, if they’re capable of that, then it wouldn’t surprise me if they shoved the Koran down the toilet.

I agree, the American attitude seems to be “so what, it’s just a book.” It amazes me how little people know of the Muslim culture. You’re right, the Koran is to Islam as Christ is to Christianity.