Attention liberals, progressives, conservatives, extremists, religious groups and atheists. Listen up. If you are bringing your faith/none-faith in the open world, you can expect to be ridiculed, drawn and cursed at. You may even become the topic of a movie called Submission.
Every major religion should know by now that in this world no place or human being is sacred. Ghandi was shot to death, Dr. King was assassinated, Mother Teresa had enemies, Jesus was crucified on a cross and Mohammed was send away from Mecca. Many churches have been burned down, many synagogues have been bombed and many mosques have seen destruction. It is an ugly world where sometimes people will agree with you and often times some people simply won’t. If you are carrying a message for the masses, let me remind you. There will be opponents who believe that you are so wrong in many ways that you have to be stopped. Those people will use a counter propaganda to derail your movement. In the events of this counter propaganda you will be judged by your do’s and don’ts. The harder you press back rumours the more it is bound to become truth or the truth gets revealed.
My humble advice to all religion followers: the best way to protect your religious conviction is to keep it to your self as much as you can and only engage in discussion with people who sincerely care to know about your religion. However if you do so, your religion’s growth will not peak. After all, every religion, movement or foundation is in existence to grow. Therefore we put our belief on the dot and hopes the world have empathy with us. But doing so we must always remember we are submitting ourselves to a jury who can be very cruel, heartless and in worst scenario an assassinator of our beliefs. As you may know I’m from Amsterdam and there were times I found Theo Van Gogh’s satires misplaced and foul, but I have never wished death on him. The freedom that Van Gogh had to express himself, I have that very same freedom too. Whenever I did not agree with him, I can either speak out against him or totally ignoring him. You can’t kill a man because he has an opinion. Then you have a lot of killing to do. We all will be busy killing one and another. In my opinion it is not realistic to go on a killing spree when ever we feel offended. We must contain ourselves and pray for our offenders, they do not know how much they hurt us or do not care a bit.
This article is written in solidarity with South Park and Lars Vilks. Why? Not because I am a fan of their work, but I believe that, whether a person is right or wrong, he or she has all the right to express their opinion. And if you don’t agree with it you can face that person with fact, ignore that person and or put yourself above the pity arguments. It is a moral judgement. Me myself, I have never said anything to hurt another person on purpose, unless I strongly believe I’m right or want to start a debate. I think it is a poor taste to attack any religion, let alone a worldwide exercised religion. But that is my humble opinion. This attack on the Holy Quran’s sacred prophet is not the first and will certainly not be the last. As the Islam religion is growing you will face many criticisms of people who opposed the Koran, as well as ex-Muslims who don’t welcome the religion any longer. But just like other major religions you should man yourself against this and other huddles along the way. And you must do so without bloodshed. Don’t let bloodshed and other war mongering extremists become the face of your religion.
Many people in Sweden and even in the rest of the world, didn’t know about the existence of the cartoons, neither did they hear of Lars Vilks until Iran and other Muslim countries decided to propagandize the cartoons and stir up people. I stopped watching South Park a long time ago and now you got me talking about it. The iron fist approach of this sensitive matter always backfires and is tend to turn people away from you, instead of meeting you half way. I firmly believe dialogue is our best way forward, from here.
I will leave this final thought with you all.
This week Yoko Ono tweeted this to her followers, whom I happened to be one of them. I think I should share it with the people of the world. She wrote: “IMAGINE PEACE: Think PEACE, Act PEACE, Spread PEACE. love, yoko”