I am gathered here today in remembrance of God's only Son. The season of His birth is upon us, in the immortal fulfillment of prophecy. It is He who affords me this freedom of expression. It is however with sadness and joy that I cannot help but consider this revelation come full circle. For it is He, the Son of God, who was tried and died so that I can overcome my many transgressions toward the achievement of eternal life. The name of God is One I am forbidden to utter. Yea, through the name of His only Son am I granted the Freedom to spend eternity in the Lord's company. The name of His risen Son is Jesuis Charlie.
The tens were a simpler time. Remember when I was all #cartoons in the name of the freedom of speech? If it was without the slightest notion of the culture from which sprung #cartoons' captions, or their context, the extent to which each satire was perceived guilty of not just violating the superstitious sensibilities of retrograde dogma doers, but also a disingenuous dig for cheap yucks at the expense of people who would ostensibly be too stupid to get the joke, it's forgivable. I can only learn French one hashtag at a time, and freedom of speech means never having to say I'm sorry. It's like love, only better.
I must not forget, also, that most important is my responsibility to haphhashtagly virtue tweet and to share in solidarity with face-friends and -associates of a friend from high school. It brings people together. I recall here from the real world of pre- even Netscape that so, too, must I demand from every Muslim an apology for the transgressions of their brethren. Okay, maybe "apology" is a misnomer sprung from the concept of apologetics, which would connote that all good Muslims must denounce all of those who murder in the name of the greatness of their God. Not to do so amounts to condoning their actions.
An additional aspect of the freedom of expression as it relates to the convenience of interpretation of the moment has it that this putative approval of terror is inevitable given the nature of this particular religion, whereas goodwill diplomacy prevails in sympathy with those apparently afraid to speak out, because, after all, their religion is unique in having made it so. The implication of the cartoon painted here is one of a pathetic number of victims who cannot escape the outward jihad of millions.
Ironies are like fine ham. Here it is the Muslims who are dressed such that they are asking to be raped. But I digress.
If you were to get honest data on the matter, how do you think the incidents of violation of the rules of engagement would compare between officially recognized government military organs and their umbrellas who define the rules, and all the ragtag randos into whose hands the former's weapons seem to happen to fall?
I like to think of the latter as the Cookie Monster. See, calling the Cookie Monster a monster is like saying that one of the default-droned wedding parties in the name of Dubya's rebranded War on Terror was a gathering of war mongers, which, of course, is what is implied by the status quo. It's explicitly insisted upon by the jingoist apologists for collateral damage. Not by Bo Rama, of course. He was presidential.
Oh dear. I just inadvertently equated a wedding party in Hwereverstan with organized militias who fill the vacuum wherever allies of my Homeland attempt to game the ruling of a country or region through the creation of an original program that becomes its own spinoff blowback reality theater. I have stepped into muddy waters and made things more cloudy. Let me be presidential: Let me be clear. People who take weapons and kill are worse than people who get married. I'll leave it to others to suggest whichever of those are all the same.
And lest those more obtuse than myself, who happen to be following all the latest fit and unfit to print, think I'm equating the arms fallen into the hands of stated enemies with one butcher's knife, willfully chosen, let me hold high the following transparency: Not all things are equal. Not all associates are friends. The friend of my friend can as likely be my enemy as the enemy of my enemy my friend. The presumption of an equation should be considered more carefully than its presumed author.
In the battle of free speeches, I suppose it's important to consider when someone is being deliberately obtuse versus when they're just obtuse, and when someone else is being rhetorically lazy versus when it's wearisome that others cannot simply read because they're obtuse, or because they're being deliberately obtuse, or taking advantage of false inferences. Freedom of speech is complicated, even if you could care less whether or not yours is appreciated. I am going on the idea that the concomitant responsibility of the right to speech should not be limited to the burden of desire for appreciation. I think that was another digression. We'll see. Consider revision.
What if one were to say, for example, that they hope Muslims don't feel the need to apologize because of the guy who killed the teacher in Paris? That statement alone would garner divergent configurations of the elements in the previous paragraph. If the statement were followed by a mention that France had participated in the slave trade, colonized all over the world, impoverished Haiti, and killed thousands in Vietnam and Algeria, and then concluded with the question "Has France apologized?", some of those interpretations might shift, and some would feel further justified in their consequent judgement of the person who'd made the statements.
My best faith analysis says that it would be inconsiderate of certain people's sensibilities to say such things in light of the murder that led to having said them. And, still, that'd be some fine irony.
Imagine if one were to respond to those statements by pointing to the fact that Libyan islamists have black men in cages for sale, on the one hand, and then they were to complete an apparent parallel with the sarcastic quip "But yes, a French white mans [sic] head rolling down the street for talking about a religion is justified."
A truly fine ham that is, to invoke the current Libyan dystopia. It brings to mind a swimming pool of anthropomorphic alphabet soup, in which I see in all their swimming and urinating glory constituent members of #toosoon and #Benghazi. There is no second z with which to spell Sarkozy. There is no lifeguard to whistle when it's time to get out.
In this pool swim the obtuse and the insensitive, these highlighting inconveniences in an untimely fashion and those leaping to the conclusion that these stop not merely at speaking ill of the dead, but underpin the pernicious contortion of the rules of engagement.
Maybe I am missing an additional irony, for I am nothing if not obtuse and in at least some relative sense insensitive. But I think the point would have been the hierarchy of due apologies, not the ranking of criminal activity. But boy can I rank criminal activity! Is it not, if not my birthright, the condition to which the human is born?
Which brings me back to the glory of the Creator and the ranking of religion. The new atheist places Islam near the bottom of the heap as the mother of all bad ideas. Considered coherently, this metaphor removes the Judeo-Christian sector from the heap, unless we bring some grandparents into the equation. My best faith interpretation would say that the analogy is not necessarily disingenuous. Maybe it's lazy.
If one were to posit that one particular religion among others was dirty, it runs the risk of ignoring the fact that "dirty religion" is redundant. If one religion happens to have a larger number of hypocrites, it does not necessarily make the religion itself more hypocritical. It could, I guess, result in that down the line. Just like the argument that one or another religion might evolve like the opinions of so many prudential presidents. But what about the hard to measure aspect of latent hypocrisy inherent to the religion and its adherents, who hold as holy the inbred aspects of the books they don't read, contexts they don't understand, histories they don't learn, and constitutions they take for granted as having really been the intention of benevolent creators who'd had their best interest in mind?
Though I am probably wont to, I will at least state here that I don't question the perception against the backdrop of life's biggest mystery that it should not be implausible that a man might supervise the construction of light, but I cannot help but question how it is that that perception came to be and who it benefits above all others.
