Terror and the Media

While surfing aimlessly this morning, I found this article on Digg:

The act of terrorism that didn't get reported on September 11, 2006 The actual article linked to is here, but I provided the Digg link because the comments are pretty interesting to read. The commenters fit into three groups:

1. People that say, "Well, abortion is murder," and support McMenemy's actions (most of their comments are hidden, and you have to click "show comment" to see them)
2. People who say, "Murder and violence goes against Christianity. It's wrong to call McMenemy a Christian, even if he says he is."
3. People who say, "Yes, this is why all religion is bad, because it fosters support for people like McMenemy that only need to be a little crazier than the rest," and mourn the state of the US media.

The fact that the people in group #1 exist at all is enough to blow group #2's position right out of the water, in my opinion. The problem is that religious moderates (group #2) pick and choose what they want to believe out of the Bible and have chosen to misuse the word Christian to mean "moral person". I'm all for a society full of moral people, but don't pretend that your morals come from an archaic book of mythology just because you can find passages where people are nice to each other. By doing so, you are making it acceptable for the nutcase minority to take amoral passages of the mythology literature seriously and cause actual harm.

It would be nice if the moderate Christians could specify the exact passages of the Bible that they want to "believe in", and put those into its own little book (it would be surprisingly short, I'm afraid), sort of a present day Council of Nicaea, if you will. They could call it the New Bible, and anyone that was still using the Old Bible would be encouraged to convert. That would solve the problem nicely. However, I think that it would be enlightening to all involved to see how much disagreement there was when in the choosing of passages.

Of course, even better would be to drop the Bible altogether and adopt another book of morals, like Aesop's Fables or something, where the fact that it was all animals talking would make it clear (I hope!) that it was all allegorical, and there would be no need for irrational belief in the supernatural.

I've gotten off topic. Back to my original reason for posting, I do recommend that you peruse both the article and the comments on Digg.