TOLERANCE

[Ninurta]

It is not bigotry when your beliefs and response is due to personal knowledge and experience.

I cannot claim any of that. I have no personal knowledge of anyone that claims to belong to the religion of Islam.

The only Muslim I know is Muslim by name only. He is not religious, and breaks every rule of Islam. He was born in India, but has spent the majority of his life in America. If he had never shared that with me, I would never have known.

All the negative things that I feel about Islam, comes from what I have read, and I will admit that all the information learned so far, has come from sources that are one sided. I never researched it, because it had never been of interest to me.

The presence of a Mosque doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. I live in the middle of "Hold My Beer" country. Even the Jehovah Witnesses give our area a bit of a wide berth. To travel 20 to 30 miles into the middle of the woods to go to prayer, seems a bit odd.

They have to know that there will be trouble. If they set up a call to prayer tower, it will be full of more bullet holes than any sign we have out here.

The target shooting, the ATV's, the dirt bikes, and swamp buggies, are a regular nuisance, especially on the weekends. Those guys have torn down and removed every gate that the country has erected to keep them off of unoccupied private and public land. Even if they pay for full time, around the clock security to keep them off the property, they will manage to create problems.

So any how, since I have no valid excuse outside of my ignorance. I guess I would be placed in the bigot category. That does not mean I would be uncivil. I try to be pleasant and respectful, to all I meet. Anyway, how would I even know if they were Muslim unless they made a point of telling me?

So "bigotry" is now just defined as seeing the world through the lens of your own culture, rather than an alien one. Funny, but Muslims do the same thing.

I was a Muslim. Grace was a Muslim when I married her. Now, neither of us would trust a Muslim as far as we could throw him. If that is "bigotry", then sign me up.

Once upon a time, being a bigot meant you were wrong about something. That no longer seems to be the case. Welcome to the 21st century, where old words mean new things.

When them good ol' boys start shooting at the minarets, tell them to aim for the speakers rather than the Muezzins. the Muezzins are useless without the speaker amplification... and there is less jail time connected with just destroying the magnet in a speaker versus punching a hole through a pet Muezzin.

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