cheese it, the cops!

still evolving

i'm joining forces with the santorums to do something about this evolution business, a la edward wilson. (henry thanks for the correction!) really if we were far more cooperative than we are - in precisely the same environment - evolutionary theorists would have less than no trouble explaining that, and likewise if we were far more competitive or aggressive. if everyone did art all the time, or if there was no such thing...no prob. that is, you've got a wee little issue with empiricalness (or possibly empiricity). (once again: our idea of art goes back at absolute most to the renaissance, more likely the 18th century. baby it is not genetic.) look, you just start with the idea that natural selection has to explain everything. really? does it explain why i just tripped over that tree root? or why my forebears have been doing so for eons? does it, in other words, explain my clumsiness, my ugliness, my indifference, my psychosis, my psoriasis, etc? does it simultaneously explain, let's see, democracy, communism, and fascism? does it explain the income tax, the protestant reformation, and rihanna's hairstyle? oh it's got to. no, no it doesn't. every change in the organism is accompanied by a thousand 'unintended' or irrelevant or non-adaptive or counter-adaptive effects. the idea that everything has an explanation, and that all the explanations must appeal to a single principle, is much more a religious than a scientific orientation. it has the same form as an appeal to god's will: everything can be explained by one thing, which we just stipulate in advance. someday we'll wonder how we ever thought this. you reason from effect to cause, but the cause is a single dimension of explanation that is assumed to obtain prior to any detailed examination of the effect: it's apriorism or something. or we're just pretending it's not an infinitely complicated mess out here.

the vatican speaks for you in all things

frank bruni argues that "Neither Rick Santorum nor the Vatican speaks for most American Catholics." perhaps i am just bewildered by the whole idea of catholicism. but i would have thought that letting the vatican speak for you is more or less a necessary condition for membership. if you disagree with the pope on a wide variety of issues, you're a protestant: that's what 'protestant' means. it seems like maybe catholicism, like judaism, has mutated from religion to ethnicity: you're a catholic if your mom is. but the catholic chuch qua religion is certainly the most epistemically authoritarian religion this side of scientology. if you're uncomfortable with that, just ditch. ok maybe catholicism is central to your identity, though you don't believe a damn thing it asserts. oh i don't know: work up a new identity, one that's closer to your identity.

rain of fire

New York Isn't Like Sodom and Gomorrah, Archbishop Says

really? not at all?

baptize this

this mormon baptism thing is deeply weird. now let's stipulate that being baptized in absentia in the church of jesus christ of latter day saints has no effect on dead people. it can neither redeem nor damn the soul of the deceased, nor indeed create a soul where there was none before. (do jews believe in the soul? or do they believe it in anything like the way mitt presumably does?) at any rate, i say: knock yourselves out. baptize the piss out of me, somewhere deep in utah. just now, in fact, i performed an elaborate ceremony, full of solemn, highly efficacious mumbo-jumbo, to proclaim brigham young and joseph smith posthumously to be atheists, to declare that brigham young and joseph smith were material objects, members of a species of mammals who existed only in the actual world. welcome back to reality, y'all!

in the age of mechanical reproduction

in case you're wondering, i agree with all these conservative types that catholic medical institutions must be exempted from rules requiring provision of contraception. this, it seems to me, is perfectly clear on constitutional grounds, but also on basic moral grounds according to which one ought not to require people to violate their own ethical and religious principles. as i always say, ask yourself which has been the source of more evil: permitting people to act according to their own moral convictions, or coercing them to act in violation of those convictions. however, on the same grounds, doctors must be permitted to opt out of these state laws requiring that women wanting abortions must be shown ultrasounds or hear their fetuses described in any particular way. here's what i'd actually suggest: such decisions must be left to each individual doctor, working with her patient. this seems entirely obvious to me. stop trying to institute conformity to your own little beliefs, convictions, prejudices, and allow each person to act according to her own.

papism uptick

santorum was destined to rise. now, maybe we aren't so pleased with a combination of statutory enforcement of religiously-derived moral standards and a neo-conservative foreign policy: huge-state conservatism, in short. but santorum is actually a sincere and intelligent spokesman for his positions, maybe just in comparison to the other candidates. one interesting thing to go along with how mormonism is playing is how catholicism of the santorum stripe goes along with evangelical protestantism. believe me, even though there's plenty they agree on - starting with abortion and gay marriage - you won't have to probe very far in american protestantism to find a richly-justified anti-papism, even at this late date.

hitchens, cockburn, islamophobia

simon brings my attention to cockburn on hitchens. i say this piece is based on three basic insights: (1) people who disagree with me are evil. (2) people who are more successful than me are evil. (3) people who are better than me at what i do are evil.

let me say something about the neo-con hitch (and also his friend martin amis), with their embrace of the concept of 'islamo-fascism,' and their suggestions that islam itself needed to be suppressed because of the terrorists who appeal to it. the anti-communist right-wingers of the fifties and sixties had cracked moments, and a really psychotic overreaction suggesting things such as that dwight eisenhower was an agent of the international communist conspiracy. they engaged in an active process of putting everyone under surveillance for intellectual purity, a kind of parody of what they were supposedly fighting against. but however, communism was a frigging nightmare, and if you weren't an anti-communist in 1961, and if you are not an anti-communist now, you were/are extremely wrong, an advocate of totalitarianism and evil. that joseph mccarthy was terribly wrong and extremely dangerous to liberty does not entail that josef stalin was ok. and in this case, if you have anything nice to say about al qaeda-type terrorism (like one of my colleagues at mica, who was in the habit calling osama a 'freedom fighter'), if you do anything to try to take the sting out of the sheer irrational evil, you are really really wrong. and if you think it can be detached entirely from islam, i think you're misguided, as i think the attempt to completely detach stalinism or the khmer rouge from marxist communism is a pitiful rationalization. and obviously hitchens' anti-religious fervor both fed and was fed by his 'islamophobia.' so: i think this led him into numerous extremely wrong conclusions. it led him to endorse something like a world war for the suppression of islam as a whole. but, there was a truth at the heart.

also, opinion journalism is not itself violence or repression. there's no point in vaguely holding hitchens responsible for invading iraq. what he did was write; that doesn't force anyone to do anything. this is one reason why we should defend freedom of expression at its widest scope. the right response to hitchens is to refute the arguments; if he kicked your ass you had no one to blame but yourself, and you should have tried again. i'll give cockburn this: he did try to do that. he is no match for hitchens in argument or polemic or wit, but that just means he needs more craft.

also if he was wrong on this, it of course does not follow that he was wrong in his literary judgments, or his picture of the history of ideas, or whatever it may be. he was often right about such things, and spoke from a depth of knowledge and reflection that made the arguments compelling even if not right.

catholic tastes

from newsweek/beast:

Chief among them is policy adviser Vince Haley, a deep thinker from the Catholic right who “reads papal encyclicals as a hobby,” Gingrich says. 

you're going to love a gingrich administration's approach to reproduction, for example. where is the know-nothing party when you need it?

israel and republicans

if i was running israel or if i was in the republican jewish coalition i would actually worry about the extreme enthusiasm for your nation and people of the likes of bachmann and perry, and of all the republican candidates (except paul) insofar as they abase themselves before israel as a way to court evangelical votes. these people intend to convert you, in order to hasten the rapture. for that matter, is that the kind of idea we want as the basis of our middle east policy? obviously it has no rational aspect; it doesn't pursue american interests; it doesn't try to understand anything that's happening on the ground at all; it slaps an a priori and completely rationally arbitrary interpretation on the realities; it is a delusional or psychotic approach to an actually dangerous zone of conflict and to actual real persons. also it is a formula for religious war.

meanwhile newt's notion that the palestinian people are an invention is extraordinarily offensive, and ought to to give everyone doubts about a newt presidency. in some sense every people is invented. 'the american people' is an invention, though it's newt's favorite trope. that doesn't mean it isn't real. you need to listen to how people identify themselves and take that perfectly seriously. but this is a little prelude to 'cultural genocide'; whatever you may call yourselves, you don't count, and the destruction of your culture would not be the destruction of anything.

popes and paternos

douthat argues today that there are parallels between catholic priests' sexual abuse of boys and the cover-ups of it and the penn state case. and folks on espn have been describing it as "the worst scandal in the history of college athletics." now let me say why i don't think these things are right, exactly. now, almost any institution - in particular any institution that deals with children - might harbor a pedophile; i guess there's a little segment of the population that is sexually configured this way; lord knows why. but the catholic church, i believe, more or less actively encouraged homosexual pedophilia for centuries. really 'celibacy' amounted to misogyny: the basic idea was not to touch women. and the idea of celibacy attracted many people who were disgusted - often for extremely good reasons - by their own sexuality. i actually think the altar boy was conceived to be a way to keep priests celibate: which is absurd, but there it is. you had thousands of abusers, layers and layers of concealment, and i think actual institutional encouragement. i don't know much about big-time college football, and it has its amazing corruptions, but it would surprise me if it had anything like that going on. what you have is one predator, and one extremely disturbing cover-up.

the worst scandals in college football are scandals that infect the whole thing routinely: those are the scandals that are peculiar to, characteristic of, the institution: scandals involving, say, cash or sex used to lure high school players to commit to a school: the way usc has conducted its program for decades, e.g. or academic scandals that amount to relieving players of their status as students. or judicial-type scandals where player misbehavior is forgiven or concealed over and over. these are the corruptions that are characteristic of the institution, as homosexual pederasty is characteristic of the catholic church. now it's probably true that sandusky was protected by a kind of culture of impunity around big-time college athletics. but it's not, i think, true that child sexual abuse is any more rampant in this environment than in any other. you'd be likelier to find that in children's charities, like sandusky's foundation, and maybe that's a place where we might focus more attention.

[let me acknowledge a little streak of homophobia in what i just wrote. and let me say that i also think that the extreme repugnance with which many people have greeted the sandusky revelations also has such a streak. 'anally raping a ten-year-old boy' causes about as severe a disgust reaction as i am capable of. and let me say: i was sexually abused by one of my step-brothers, and as an adolescent i was incessantly chicken-hawked by men: the guy on the bus who just puts his hand on your crotch; the guy who picks you up hitch-hiking and asks whether you like to masturbate etc etc. i kind of had to fight for a heterosexual identity. well obviously girls have to put up with shit like that from heterosexual men. but if that turned them against heterosexuality, you might understand it. but the homosexual element is intrinsic to the catholic situation (though of course there might be an occasional girl abused by a priest). reason tells me it's just as bad either way. nausea tries to tell me something else. no doubt further therapy is recommended.]

 

haven't we learned anything?

i'm glad to hear that romney and huntsman are members of a non-christian cult. there are two sorts of people i could never bring myself to vote for: (a) a christian (anyone who believes that the eternal god appeared in time and died could believe absolutely anything), and (b) the sort of person who believes anything that the majority of americans believe. haven't we learned any lessons from our long string of failed christian presidents elected by popular vote? geez.

they should ask cain what specifically in sharia law he objects to.

romney and huntsman definitely have weirdness issues.

whiners in the hands of an angry god

america might dislike atheists, but even i hate whining atheists. if most people disagree with you, and regard your opinions as incomprehensible and reprehensible, just smile and go right on. actually i can't think of any serious discrimination i've ever faced for being an atheist, born and raised.

this is a test

i think if rick perry gets into the race, he'll have a reasonable chance of getting nominated (though i don't withdraw my prediction of pawlenty). as sympathetic as i am to his notion of splitting up the united states, which is long overdue, the fundamentalist hyper-right christianity would make him an extremely disconcerting president. then there's cain's call for a straight religious test for office. it's funny, but one of the world's most famous religious skeptics could get elected president of the united states in 1800. now there certainly is a de facto religious test. maybe atheism needs a political party.

we've got to get over this living god business, whether it's selassie or schneerson, obama or lennon, david foster wallace or kurt cobain (oops some of these people are dead).

The saffron-robed Sathya Sai Baba had a huge following with ashrams in more than 126 countries. He was said to perform miracles — conjuring rings and watches and “vibhuti,” a sacred ash that his followers applied on their foreheads — from his overgrown and unkempt Afro-style hair.

um, yeah! give me a couple of says to practice up and i'll conjure rings and watches too, albeit rather badly. i wonder if he did card tricks.

notre dame went well: threw down some immortal technique and anarchist political aesthetics to the catholics. obviously i am disappointed that there's not a permanent government shutdown. i expected the leaders of the legislative branch to resign in embarrassment after a sudden realization of who they actually are. i'm reading henry adams' beautifully-written and -researched history of the united states of america during the administrations of thomas jefferson. jefferson came in and eliminated all internal taxes (funding the federal government exclusively through excises and tariffs on imported goods), while his treasury secretary albert gallatin (a biography of whom henry adams also wrote) launched a systematic effort to eliminate the national debt. jeff wrote: 'Our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very unexpensive one - a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants." tea par-tay! (on the other hand, he was our least christian president, regarded as one of the most extreme religious skeptics in the world. try that in contemporary american politics.)

 

would it make y'all happy if an american philosophy professor burned a bible? because i'm here for you.

franklin graham on cnn this morning, from japan:

carol costello: 'What do you say to people who ask how God could have allowed this to happen?'

graham: 'We don't think God did allow this to happen. He didn't intend this to happen....And our message to the people of Japan is, continue to trust in God.'

now there is some clear thinking.

obviously the right really has no idea how to respond to egypt. they kind of like freedom and stuff, but then again they are pro-israeli and anti-muslim freaks. this has something to do with how israel is necessary to the rapture or something. i love clear, realistic thinking. anyway, hit that first link and say it with me: thank the good lord for ron paul.

most muslims are not terrorists. but most terrorists are muslims. there's very little chance that any given muslim is sporting a suicide vest, an extremely good chance that anyone sporting a suicide vest is a muslim. i don't know: create a google news alert for "pakistan suicide bomber" and see what comes in today. the attacks are continuous; no sign that they're running out of volunteers; they throw them away by the dozen. there are serious operations in many locations on every continent except antarctica. they're successfully recruiting in minneapolis, for example, and not among the buddhists. not only that, but the motivation is directly religious. the groups are 'islamist.'

now are there anti-terrorist muslims, as well as elements of the teachings of islam that appear incompatible with killing people at random? of course. now the pc idea is that muslims with sympathy for terrorism constitute a tiny, an infinitesimal, minority. however, i think you'd find a pretty widespread sympathy in various muslim communities here and there, or at least you'd find a lot of condemnations hedged about with qualifications. wrong, but...understandable. you might want to think about how the organizations are funded, what sort of relation they have with the communities from which the terrorists emerge, and so on. no movement is this widespread and potent without a whole background of support of various kinds. the taliban had support widespread enough to throw the soviets out of afghanistan and run the country until invaded by a foreign army. all over the middle east, the biggest domestic issue for the governments is how to deal with their islamists, often more or less the most potent political force in the culture (cf muslim brotherhood in egypt) outside the state. draw the wrong cartoon, and there are angry mobs all over the muslim world, screaming "death" or issuing fatwas with sentences of immediate transmission to the afterlife.

here's the usual line: people don't blame christians in general or christianity for, say, oklahoma city. on the other hand mcveigh's self-account was not primarily religious. the killings of abortion doctors are a better example, and people definitely use acts like that to condemn christianity, or large swathes of it. listen to rachael maddow on this topic, and the way she connects such killings to much more mainstream evangelical christians, or even to the right/religious wing of the republican party or fox news. that's not insane, and i would think about the history of violent and fanatical christianity for a few moments. it's not edifying. does it have anything to do with the teachings of jesus?, a profound man of peace, who said "His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire." that's...typical. think that might help you justify your crusades or giving people a choice between conversion and impalement, demonstrating the effect of impalement with extreme vividness? these things set half the world on fire in their day.

but attacking christianity is actually compatible with pc standards. attacking islam, or even making any kind of assessment with a vague connection to reality, is completely unacceptable. it's sort of understandable because if we end up in a completely polarized religious war, we're all in trouble. but on the other hand you can't address the problem very effectively if you're not even permitted to examine or describe the problem. but juan williams wasn't even saying all that.

at any rate, i'm just against strategic assertion. there's not a lot of real benefit to "let's pretend." and yet that is all there is to these formal and informal pc speech codes. alright. enforce your little forms of words. you can't be puzzled, though, if i have no tendency whatever to believe what you say, or even believe that you believe it. start insisting that everyone manifest your favorite set of fraudulent beliefs (fraudulent in the sense that they are not actually beliefs) and you create a la-la land of non-stop lying. or it doesn't even really rise to the level of lying; it's just enforced unanimous noise, like a flock of geese or something. if what you say is not about reality, but about expressing your solidarity or trying to appear to be a good person by the standards of a given moment, then what you say loses its meaning, in a very clear way. the words no longer have their customary reference, or even any reference at all. to believe something is to take it to be true, not to take it to be nice, or sweet, or even necessary to express under the circumstances. people who make and enforce speech codes, in other words, do not believe what they're saying, and neither do the enforcees. but it's even worse than that. 'islam' in their vernacular does not refer to islam; it refers to a set of possible effects of the utterance itself, etc.

i don't feel i need to read sam harris's book, as i suspect that one could find more sophisticated or careful or plausible or informed versions of the same sort of argument written by philosophers who have thought about the issue for decades. someone would have to persuade me that sam harris knows enough about ethics of the last 500 years to make his position plausible or push it beyond, i don't know, mill. perhaps i will end up getting sucked in, but i'm too busy reading mencken and figuring out the very nature of the universe: like hegel, i plan to die just before completing the project. oops, almost! anyway i don't really get this summary. the most it appears to argue is that utilitarianism is not incompatible with science. it's "not irrational" to think about improving the welfare or human beings. ok i guess. i was expecting something from evolutionary theory or genealogy that would establish utilitarianism in the face of kantian objections or work out that thing where the actual consequences of any action are incalculable, or explain why we should hang the innocent to prevent more pain etc. 

maybe the "argument" is something like this?: each person in fact wants her own welfare (no doubt pushed to do so by evolutionary factors). so all of us should worry about all of us's welfare. mill really really tried to make that 'so' plausible. and yet it is a completely arbitrary inference. at any rate, that evolution makes us want to survive does not entail that we ought to survive. indeed, evolution extinguishes species with great glee, and such extinctions are as important in the evolutionary process as the momentary flourishing of some species. honestly, this kind of argument no more shows that we should take care of one another than that we should take care of mosquitoes.

look it's great that you're a utilitarian. but the notion that your moral theory can be scientifically established is balderdash. and once you have Nature dictating moral principles, you are no atheist.

cb asks "What role, if any, do you think the scientific method should play in the world?" well, actually i have respect for the scientific method, which on certain subject-matters is an excellent way to try to get at the truth. for example, is the temperature on our planet actually increasing? well i don't see how you can do anything with that question without going out and systematically studying actual temperatures. now: is global warming a bad thing? are we ill and destroying the planet? is it nature's way of telling us something's wrong? is it better for there to be a human species or snow leopards or a planet earth than for there not to be? i say science just whiffs on such questions, if its self-understanding is basically right.

think about a principle like this: "All people are created equal." now what does that mean? is science going to help you figure out what it means? and then if it did somehow, what experiments or observations would bear it out or falsify it? but, on the other hand, is it a presupposition of the social science that you're doing? if you measure the effectiveness of a policy by the increased welfare of those affected, or even just display the data you've gathered,  do you count some of these people more than others? or does each one = 1, whether they're white or black, male or female? see: a social vision or theory far in excess to anything science could pronounce on is built in at the base of every sociological study. 

this is not merely to press the fact/value distinction. what is it like to be a bat? is the principle of non-contradiction true? does 2+3 = 5? does barack love michelle? how do you throw a pot? lays or pringles? which way will the plot of this film twist next? only a complete doink takes such questions to Science.

the problem isn't science, it's scientism: "Science" as the only source of truth. the sources of truth are many and varied, from flashes of intuition to a priori conceptual exploration to aesthetic experience. i guess you could try to explain *those* things as brain states etc. that wouldn't tend to show whether what they yield up is true or false, for example, even if you could make some progress.

and the social sciences are just by and large completely disingenuous attempts to manipulate people. you can study students' progress scientifically through standardized tests. really? what do you mean by "knowledge"? an entire normative orientation is built into the very idea of a standardized testing regime, or in a diagnosis of depression, or in a model for achieving economic recovery. the facts bear on these things, but that the procedure is scientific is just wrong or a rationalization for actual exercise of power, and an offloading of it: it's not me saying this, or even doing this to you: it's...Science!

and also i would say this deal where you have to choose between science and religion, reason and faith, fact and fantasy, obama and palin, is just jive. no one gets along in this world without constantly reasoning and without constantly believing things for which he has no reasons.

what's actually disturbing is the way Science serves power: the way people purport that whatever policies they think should be in place are not their own doing but that of Reality. obama actually takes this tack constantly, like his forebears john kerry and al gore. and i think you see that it has its limits as a leadership style; where's the passion etc? hey that's not even you talking, by your own account. it's, um, experts. someone who is that incapable of taking responsibility for their own opinions and their own attacks on your autonomy should never be listened to about anything.

we had better think about the epistemic hierarchy we are constructing. if all the truth is held by harvard professors and none by persons of other sorts, then of course you could ignore tea partiers or merely ridicule them. for one thing, all the harvard professors are leftists. however, you probably have no more stable grasp on the deliverances of particle physics or brain scanning than the rankest tea partier, so you don't know anything either. all you do is recite what these people say they know. it takes a lot of gaul to go from that sort of position to the amazing conclusion that Science exclusively determines truth and all other values. but i tell you that the structure i've just described is a religion.

sam-harris-the-atheists's new book is sub-titled "how science can determine human values." determine! it's unlikely that i'll read that book, but that's a very good statement of science as a religion, and it is complete hogwash. if you think you're deriving "human values" from evolution, or from climate studies, or from psychology, or from string theory, or genomics, i say you are utterly self-deluded. by an astonishing coincidence, science will end up confirming precisely the "values" (=politics) you started out with: your mother's new deal liberalism or whatever. reality itself demands that you support obama's tax policies. these claims for science, or this revival of extreme scientism, simply make it a new scholasticism, and it is a profoundly a structure of epistemic authority, a constant bowing and scraping before 'expertise' as articulated in these gigantic institutional contexts on matters about which you can have no understanding without being processed through the institution to the ph.d. and beyond, which you must simply accept. what's obvious about these new atheists etc is that they still need a religion. someone has to tell them what values to hold or they are lost. and they are angry because they got lost. but now they've found their faith, their priesthood.

so we've got the raving anti-islamic thing going: maybe a bit of a delayed reaction. i would build a mosque at ground zero. but it would be silly to deny that islam's history is infested continuously with fanaticism, violence, war, and extreme irrationality. they're almost as bad as papists. well just as bad or badder, really. i'll defend your right to worship how you please. only: how can you possibly believe that crap? and, how come your people are blowing themselves up in order to blow random other people up, all over the world, every single day? the evil of that is matched only by its overwhelming stupidity. really, i guess we're all just going to sit and say that islam is a religion of peace, etc. that's a bit hard to maintain in the face of reality.

watchin cnn yesterday, as rick sanchez interviewed someone or other about bishop eddie long. the theme was the "gospel of prosperity" and the idea of religious leaders as extreme conspicuous consumers, driving around in bentleys and wearing 5k suits etc. sanchez, believe it or not, said "maybe it's because i'm a catholic, but i really don't understand this whole thing." yes no doubt for the true catholic, the idea of fantastic wealth and homosexual child sexual abuse by the clergy are completely incomprehensible. like god. 

 

exercising my popesque authority, i, too, beatify  john henry newman. specifically: the book below is a fundamental work in epistemology as well as an apology for faith. his "all-or-nothing" account of belief was fundamental for my early work in epistemology.

so if pastor jones was going to burn copies of the koran, and the federal government intervened, even with a pretext, i think the jurisprudence is pretty clear that that would violate constitutional protections on freedom of speech. but as i say you'd be taking federal action to prevent insult to islam. that violates the establishment clause.

watchin morning joe this morning and folks such as pat buhanan and the execrable "donnie" are suggesting that obama simply find some legal pretext and stop the dude from burning korans. we are at war! plus then he'd look decisive and get a 10-point bounce! ok think about this from the other perspective: if it's the case that he can stop it, then he is indeed responsible for it. so that if it hapens, the reaction against the american state would be fully justified. not only that but he'd be suspending the constitution in order to protect islam from insult. i don't know, might as well call that an eruption of sharia into our legal system.

just for the hell of it, i'm going to defend your right to burn korans. now one thing to understand: a text is, at least apparently, an abstract object. there are millions of korans: each equally is and is not the text. the koran itself - well, this is how we think about text - is, using the phrase of arthur danto, "logically incombustible." anyway, go ahead and burn my favorite books - perhaps the essays of ralph waldo emerson -if you like. that doesn't seem to hurt them, much less me. y'all muslims aren't idolators; that's why no pics of the prophet. you're textolators. yeah it's an abstract object, but it's not allah either.

perhaps you just can't stand for your religion to be treated with contempt, even by floridians. i don't know, get over it. think of the contempt of floridians as a badge of honor. or contempt em right back; burn the works of carl hiassen or dave barry or something. 

the basic picture is supposed to be that the average muslim can't understand that everything that happens in the u.s. is not done by the government, or by everyone or something. they'll hold us all responsible for acts we condemn etc. if this is indeed the case, and if i splain this to you and you still don't get it, i don't think you're the kind of person who's going to be acting comprehensibly in general, so i guess if you're gonna try to kill people or something as a consequence i can't really do much but shoot back.