Burning desires.
11th September 2010
The Ochlophobist reflects on the current scene.
I have burned a lot of books in my day. It was a ritual at a former workplace of mine. We burned some old, beat up Qur’ans we didn’t think would ever sell, but, for the sake of fairness of course, we also burned translations of the Bible that we didn’t like and everything that Matthew Fox ever wrote and pretty much every work of pop spirituality that was published in English in the 90s. Burning books is fun, shooting them is funer, and blowing them up is funest. But since becoming Orthodox, a religion which burns holy things which are no longer usable, such as damaged icons, etc., it seems that burning as an act of dissent is not as fun as it used to be. Perhaps they could put a Qur’an into a jar of urine. No, wait, that is what Americans from blue states call art, and Muslims who know that our federal government occasionally pays to have Christian symbols thus treated might then think that Islam has finally made it as an accepted American religion, and I don’t think that is the purpose behind what had been planned for a Florida campfire tomorrow. We live in confusing times.