"Kill her!" screamed Islamic protestors in the Sudan, marching and waving machetes and knives, "No mercy!" Her unspeakably heinous offense? Letting Islamic schoolchildren name a teddy bear "Mohammed." Apparently it's okay to name many males after the Prophet, but to name a toy so was taken as an unforgivable insult to Islam and sufficient cause for execution. Only international pressure reduced her punishment to a few days' arrest and deportation.
Good grief. I've noticed that the more wrong and unreasonable people are, the louder they carry on. It's as if notching up their grimaces, their volume, and their violent gestures justifies their position. These protests everywhere in the name of this or that cause--sometimes I think the protesters themselves may not even know what they're shouting against but just like a good communal vent--are beginning to sound to me like a child's tantrum. Like children, they don't seem to know how to advance their position by any reasonable or peaceful means, so they just scream till they get their way. And if people try to ignore them or reason with them or calm them down, they just scream all the louder.
It seems like people make the biggest fuss to defend their position when they're dead wrong. When they're right, they don't have to state it hysterically, for it is usually evident. And I know of no instance when people in general have become convinced of the rightness of a cause just because it's been passionately screamed and menaced at them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
What gets me are those religious people who wish to suppress all expressions of religions other than their own, including expressions of no religion.
Is their faith so weak that they feel they need to protect themselves from potentially corrupting views?
It's sadly interesting that Eric Hoffer's book (The True Believer) remains ever-so-relevant. The common error seems to be in thinking incorrectly that people are different from us based on surface appearances, when where they may be really different is in their conceptual world.
Post a Comment