Que Surah, Surah: Since We're Getting All Righteous...

PZ Myers at the Pharyngula blog posted this clip from Rachel Maddows about the Right Wing Christians that Rick Perry is in bed with.

Can't believe I used to live close to this dark and strange vortex of "faith."  It was a near thing, me sticking around to see how that battle came out.  I didn't.  But I remember some of these names and faces.

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I can't support a faith that aims to cut me off from hot demon love.

Michelle Bachmann's signature on Iowa's bizarre "The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence" (see here for comment) persuades me that the battle lines are getting drawn nicely in America.  This'll happen when culture gets pluralistic and people panic.

Meantime, an Islamic student of mine writes in a persuasive essay that Islam is a viable alternative to the Christian Right, as it is "at its roots and in its texts" more righteous (paragraph here on the Pillars of Islam), and peaceable, and tolerant.

I scribbled in the margins:

But didn't The Prophet institute the jizyah (tax against other faiths)?  What about 2:191-193 (with 4:104)? Or 2:216? or 4:89?  Or 9:29? Do not neglect striking and obvious evidence that your reader might know that contradicts your thesis.

In the coming clash of fundamentalisms, the loser is democracy, and justice.

"My God was bigger than his god," Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin famously said of Osman Atto.  Charles Martel's was bigger than Abdul Rahman Al-Ghafiqi's god at the Battle of Tours (732).  But Saladin's was greater than Guy of Lusignan's at the Battle of Hattin (1187).

I could go on and on.

Who wins the battles? 

Who wins the wars?

Because the battles go on and on, all sides see the outcome as apocalyptic and final.  But nobody should be shocked to find the battles getting lost.   And those who rail against America on behalf of God should not complain too loudly when they are paying the jizyah.

The real loser? 

Those of us who like to do the wild thing with the demons of tolerance, who dislike the jizyah tax, who don't mind losing the war if we can be left alone by these people whose gods seem so freaking bloody, so small, and so perverse.