Propheteering

This is a response to a recent essay by my friend Hank Fox, on the subject of the cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed and their aftermath. Read his essay over at www.hankfox.com, and then proceed below (or don't, it's your call):    

Hank,  

I'm well aware of your thoughts on fundamentalism and organized religion, and many of your readers probably are, too. However, I'm not sure I'm with you 100% in your essay on the Mohammed cartoons, etc. My basic beef is that you seem to be lumping all Muslims together as violent and dangerous based on the reactions of the crazy ones. I'll grant that there seems to be a higher percentage of violent psychos in Islam than in, say, Quakerism, but Islam also has its share of fairly well-adjusted followers (in the sense that they're not violent, not that they're right about other things). You've attacked the whole religion based on the antics of the fundamentalist jihadists -- and though the less-violent Muslims might have beliefs/values you abhor, such as the subjugation of women, etc., those issues differ in type and degree from the problems of the jihadists.

The essay doesn't make enough of a connection between your reasons for attacking violent fundamentalism and your reasons for attacking organized religion in general. They're related issues, but the relationship is complex enough to warrant a complex critique.  

To say "we can't live" with Muslims might be misconstrued as sounding like a call for genocide -- I understand you're simply following through with the crazy boyfriend analogy, but the analogy doesn't work because we non-Muslims can't opt to "kick the Muslims out and change the locks" as if they were a crazy boyfriend. We can't even "call the cops" -- because the "cops" in this case are busy shooting their friends in the face with birdshot. ;)  

Just a few thoughts from a devil's advocate point of view.  

Bill

Franklin and Fiction

Yikes, it's been more than a week since my last post. I've been busy, tutoring at the Writing Center 20 hours per week, and reading, reading, reading: Franklin, Anne Bradstreet, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Faulkner, Melville and others, as well as some dense works of literary theory and criticism, just in the first three weeks of the semester.

The Benjamin Franklin autobiography was quite revealing, and it changed my impression of that founding father quite drastically. He was a vegetarian for a while but caved in at the smell of fried cod, he had several "intrigues with low women" and he did some fairly dirty journalism (making himself wealthy in the process) as publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Yet his reputation remains that of a pillar of American virtue and values. Hmmm ... maybe that's not ironic after all. But I digress.  

The greatest challenge so far has been writing fiction for the workshop I'm taking. This week I finished my first short story -- the first bit of fiction I've completed since the seventh grade. I've decided not to post it on the blog, but anyone who wants to read it can e-mail me at smokinbill@aol.com, and I'll send you a copy of the text, with my compliments.