The Mosque Next Door - What should you do about it?

A huge Islamic Center is about to be built next door to your local church. What do you do?

Unfortunately, due to misrepresentation in the media and outright lies by people with a vested interest in creating conflict, the all to common reaction is protest and outrage.

Lies such as "They're funded by Saudi Arabia," and "It's a breeding ground for terrorists," get yelled out by intolerant bigots and passed on by a media that thrives on controversy and conflict.
Luckily there are still sane and tolerant people in this world who instead welcome their new neighbours. Here is a wonderful tale of such tolerance and sanity: Cordova Christians put out welcome mat for mosque.

Well done to the pastor and congregation of Heartsong Church in Cordova, Tennessee. They are applying the tenets of their faith and not only offering the hand of friendship, but are also communicating with the "Muslims next door." The result is peace and understanding as it should be between us all whatever our religion or lack of.

I wish the so called "Christians" in other parts of the country would take a lesson from these good people and act likewise.

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How supported is Al Qaeda by Muslims?

Too often the media portrayal of Muslims implies that they support Al Qaeda. Too often the media portrayal of Islam is that it is a violent and hate driven religion.

Both of these ideas are false generalities and, just to prove it, there is a very interesting diagram on the "Anonymous Arabist" blog which you can see below.

Notice that the Al Queda population is at most 0.00063% of the Muslim population of the world. Not exactly a significant amount.

So let's realize that Muslims are just human beings like the rest of the population of the world and stop creating controversy over building Mosques in New York and stop the misrepresentations of their intentions in the media.

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The NY Mosque

I have been appalled by the media frenzy over the plan to build a mosque in a cultural center several blocks from Ground-Zero.

The mosque and the people who will attend it have no connection whatever with the 911 terrorist attacks and neither does the Islamic religion.

The people who perpetrated 911 were terrorists not Muslims. To equate the religion with the actions of a few evil men makes as much sense as to say that all Catholics are child molesters just because some priests committed such acts.

Such thinking is not rational.

Recognize the differences between the 911 terrorists and the people who are building the mosque. Recognize that the only similarity between them is that all involved have a head, two arms and two legs and there the similarity ends.

In Scientology we know that sanity is the ability to recognize differences, similarities and identities. For example, if a man thinks the friendly dog coming towards him is the same as the dog that bit him last week, then him will act irrationally.

And that is what is happening here: people are acting irrationally, egged on by a news media that craves conflict and will create conflict if it doesn't already exist.

So let's practice tolerance, recognize the differences and get back to doing something constructive in the world.
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Good news for human rights in Germany

After 17 years of operation the "Scientology Task Force" of the city of Hamburg has been shut down.

Of course they didn't announce the fact that after 17 years of intrusive and unconstitutional investigation of the Church of Scientology's activities they found nothing - as in zip, nada, sweet FA, zilch - illegal going on. Nothing they could prosecute, nothing they could publish a government pamphlet about, basically nothing at all.

Must be pretty embarrassing for the Hamburg government and the notorious, human rights violating head of the "task force", Ursula Caberta. They created a task force based on rumors, lies and bigotry and after 17 years finally realized they were wasting government time and tax payer money.

Oh well, it's one more step forward in the fight for Religious Freedom and a great day for human rights in Germany.

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