...The Muslims suggested their plan, people sincerely expressed their honest heart felt reasons for not wanting it.
What reasons? All I've heard is the rather oddly narrowed sensitivity posit. And I've responded to why I find that utterly under thought and nothing anyone should support having sufficiently considered it.
They rudely decided to disregard the wishes of those who were hurt during 911... for their own gratification.
Well, no. Some of the hurt and killed were Muslim. But that's no better reason to build a mosque than the loss of non Muslim lives is to stop it. And going forward with their plans absent more than an unjustifiable attempt to paint those who objected to the misuse of Islam as somehow bearing the taint of those who were not among their number strikes me as reasonable. Capitulating to those who would use that broad brush would be the worse offense.
I believe they have tried to play down the issue that it will be a place of worship ... but rather some sort of community center. I wonder if Christians and Jews will be welcomed to recreated there???
I don't know. I don't know that they'd be any more likely to want to do so than I would be found hanging out in a Kingdom Hall. But I don't think they were playing down the worship element so much as they were attempting to demonstrate a larger, more inclusive purpose and a recognition of the horror that transpired a few blocks away.
The faith of the Jewish and Protestant religions did not participate in the 911 tragedy.
Would you like a little ethnic cleansing to go with that? Should I remind you how easy that broad brush is to apply? The faith of Islam,as recognized by the vast majority of the billion and a half adherents, is a peaceful one. Attempting to connect the fanatics of any ideology or religious impulse to more than their own grotesque desires is a mistake.
Would the Muslims want us or allow the Jews and Christians to build a temple on the Mount next to the Dome of the Rock ... in order to show that we want to demonstrate our willingness to mend our relationships with them???
Not a parallel. Ask if the Muslims in New York have a problem with a temple or a church being built next door. What foreigners and foreign governments will or won't allow is a separate issue UNLESS you mistake Islam as one mindset--a mistake you wouldn't make concerning your own faith. Or do you consider yourself in accord with every Catholic or Protestant thought on the exercise of faith?
So? They still don't respect us or regard our heartfelt wishes.
You don't speak for US. You may speak for a majority of impassioned people with their heads screwed on wrong, absent an argument I've yet to hear, but that's something else. You'd said:
now they persist with their disregard of our citizens ...
That's wrong. American Muslims are part of that citizenry. So it's more accurate to say WE don't all agree on the issue. And heartfelt error is no more respectable because it's sincere, which I believe I raised earlier.
Yes, atheists and Muslims may be trying to point something out for sure, and they may surely being trying to change everyone else ... but I don't accept the idea that change should be rammed down the throats of others.
Then stop suggesting a different set of rules for these Muslims than we have for, say, the 9th Ward of New Orleans, where some Christian pastors proclaimed God's wrath had fallen, or the areas where Christians bombed abortion clinics. If you aren't out demonstrating or protesting Christian churches in or near those parts you shouldn't be holding that line now.
... when it comes to human respect of those different from them ... They are certainly not sensitive nor tolerant as Christians have been in the past.
Depends on when you look. There are periods of history when either religion was more or less tolerant. Europe hemorrhaged blood during the Reformation and counter, Catholic and Protestant going at it like the Hindus and Muslims in latter day India. And the Muslim reign in old Jerusalem was far more lenient and less bloody than the Christian liberation. These days? The secular, free West does a better job than the theocratic states it frequently wrestles with and those no longer tend to be Christian, though they were during the first couple of World Wars. But that says less about our faith than how we've learned to restrain its darker misuse by some. And as I mentioned, we learned that the long and bloody way.
So you say. I don't stand in mobs and shout down people ... but I guess I would - if I felt they were blatantly dangerous.
I was responding to your particular use of the word courage and simply noting that opposition to the mosque doesn't require any. It only requires you to raise your voice with a large number of similar voices. And how you feel about it interests me less than why you do and what you can present to evidence its reasonableness.
I grew up around people who were earnest and fervent in their support of fairly horrific ideas to very ill effect. Having seen what that does and how easily it insinuates itself into the social fabric, I'm less than enamored of emotionalism as a central theme of good government. That way lies madness.
And it will remind me of our blatant enemy in our midst, who has no regard for our citizens.
Said, at one time, a majority of Americans about the Catholic minority and many wondered if one could be elected President given the strength of that suspicion. I'd say it's important to distinguish between a fanatical, dangerous group and the rest of Islam, the majority of Islamic practice and belief.
...I've just suggested that they should freely respect the feelings of those affected by 911, but you've just suggested that they should rejoice at violence.
I've done nothing of the sort. Stop feeling your way through an argument and use the brain God gave you for something more than a word processor. :mmph: It's your insistence on conflating the one group with the other, absent any reason to do so, that causes this sort of insulting nonsense to escape your noggin. Do better. It's your willingness to do so that I set out should be at the heart of the actual terrorist supporters delight. Then they can say, "See? It is us against them, just as we told you."
That lets me know your heart...but then I've seen your heart on other threads as well.
For shame, Ps. You've never said boo to me in the negative on an issue of character and now because I do what a friend should do and tell you when you're acting like a pack mule and running with a thought that's beneath you you sink to this?
Shame on you. Else, I've been called a N-lover in my day too. I took it well enough when I considered the thinking on the other side of it. And I didn't enter into this discourse with the notion that I'd be winning back pats. Sorry you felt the need to try that.
If this is the beginning and end of it, you've yet to see me at all. But I've known this sort of thinking all my life and what it leads otherwise decent people to do and say. You should reconsider it.