I'm an unabashed fan of the Texas Freedom Network. Their concise mission statement clearly explains what they're all about: "The Texas Freedom Network advances a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the religious right."
And the first paragraph of their extended mission statement pleases me every time I read it:
Founded in 1995, the Texas Freedom Network is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization of more than 45,000 religious and community leaders. Based in Austin, the Texas Freedom Network acts as the state's watchdog, monitoring far-right issues, organizations, money and leaders. The organization has been instrumental in defeating initiatives backed by the religious right in Texas, including private school vouchers and textbook censorship at the Texas State Board of Education.
Furthermore, although their activities are focused on Texas, their impact is certainly far greater. The critical issues they raise about religious freedom and the work they undertake to protect the integrity of public education has an effect on citizens across the United States.
They also distribute a daily email update listing important articles on these topics from around the world. But as much as I resonate with all that the Texas Freedom Network is attempting to accomplish, I've been having a problem with them of late. The simple fact is that their daily email update has begun to depress me enormously!
The attacks on our freedoms that they regularly bring to light are simply amazing -- and incredibly troubling. Let me share the latest egregious affront they've brought to my attention. On March 25 they highlighted a rant published by Bryan Fischer who claims that First Amendment protections do not apply to Islam. It would be bad enough if Fischer were just a random blogger expressing misinformed hatred toward members of a religion he didn't understand. But Fischer is far more important than that. He is the director of issues analysis for the American Family Association (AFA), he hosts Focal Point, a talk show on American Family Radio, and posts regularly on the AFA-run blog Rightly Concerned.
Fischer's claims are breathtakingly inane. Rather than paraphrasing what he had to say, let me quote him directly so there's no misunderstanding, although given the piece's title, "Islam and the First Amendment: privileges but not rights," I don't think misunderstanding is possible.
Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment.Our government has no obligation to allow a treasonous ideology to receive special protections in America, but this is exactly what the Democrats are trying to do right now with Islam.
From a constitutional point of view, Muslims have no First Amendment right to build mosques in America. They have that privilege at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked if, as is in fact the case, Islam is a totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States.
Let me repeat that last part just to be certain that it wasn't overlooked: "From a constitutional point of view, Muslims have no First Amendment right to build mosques in America."
This extreme position isn't an aberrant thought of Fischer's, unrelated to anything else he has written. Nor is it the most extreme thing he's had to say on the rights of Muslims in the United States. In fact, on April 10, 2010, he published an essay entitled "Time to restrict Muslim immigration to U.S., send them back home."
Again, I think it is important to permit Fischer to speak for himself.
The most compassionate thing we can do for Americans is to bring a halt to the immigration of Muslims into the U.S. This will protect our national security and preserve our national identity, culture, ideals and values. Muslims, by custom and religion, are simply unwilling to integrate into cultures with Western values and it is folly to pretend otherwise. In fact, they remain dedicated to subjecting all of America to sharia law and are working ceaselessly until that day of Islamic imposition comes.The most compassionate thing we can do for Muslims who have already immigrated here is to help repatriate them back to Muslim countries, where they can live in a culture which shares their values, a place where they can once again be at home, surrounded by people who cherish their deeply held ideals. Why force them to chafe against the freedom, liberty and civil rights we cherish in the West?
In other words, simple Judeo-Christian compassion dictates a restriction and repatriation policy with regard to Muslim immigration into the U.S.
How can this sort of hatred be helpful? That Fischer is a Christian clergy member and a spokesperson for the AFA, a group that claims it "exists to motivate and equip individuals to restore American culture to its moral foundations" and "defends the rights of conscience and religious liberty from infringement by government and from subjugation in popular culture," makes his position the height of hypocrisy. That Fischer's hatred has not been condemned by the AFA and that he continues as one of their major spokespeople, should tell all of us all we need to know about the AFA.
As depressed as the Texas Freedom Network's updates often make me, I am deeply grateful that they exist. We need to be aware of the vile filth that is being spread in the name of religion and about the core principles of the United States. If, collectively, we take action to combat the hatred being spread by people like Bryan Fischer and the American Family Association, we can actually build a healthier and more harmonious society. As so many before me have said, hate is not a Christian value -- and we shouldn't let it become an American value either.
Follow Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mzclergyletter
American Family Association | Right Wing Watch
If Muslims want to worship their deity they have the right to do that.
Muslims do not have the right to impose their rules and regulations on anyone else. I prefer everyone keep their religion to themselves.
Islam isn't "just" a religion. It is also a political ideology with political and religious law that is not separated from the bowing and praying part.
I believe this is where the problem is.
At the end of WW2 the Shinto religion was purged of its political aspects. This is what must happen to Islam if it is to be welcome in the free world.
Christianity isn't "just" a religion. It is also a political ideology with political and religious law that is not separated from the being saved and praying part.
There is certainly some confusion here. I believe hypocrisy is "where the problem is".
One of your posts whining about granting equality to minorities and women showed me which group you limit your concern for. Your idea of a "Great Nation" is one that is great for only a few,greedy, white, males.
I believe in family values. Bigotry is not valued in my family.
History has been such that the West’s relations with Islamic world have from the first been radically different from those with any other civilisation….Europe has known Islam thirteen centuries ( now fourteen), mostly as an enemy and a threat. It is no wonder that Muhammad more than any other of the world’s religious leaders has had a “poor press” in the West and that Islam is the least appreciated there of any of the world’s other faiths. Until Karl Marx and the rise of communism the prophet had organised and launched the only serious challenge to western civilisation that it has faced the whole course of history….the attack was directed both, both military and ideological. And it was powerful
Quoted from the Book Islam in Modern Histroy (Page 109)
Author Wilfred Cantwell Smith.
And from Michael Hart's : The Most influential in history
My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world’s most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the secular and religious level. ..is probable that the relative influence of Muhammad on Islam has been larger than the combined influence of Jesus Christ and St. Paul on Christianity. ...It is this unparalleled combination of secular and religious influence which I feel entitles Muhammad to be considered the most influential single figure in human history.
Leave you to think about without preconceived notions
It is frightening how similar the ideas and hypocrisies of today's religious right are to those of the Pilgrims. It is also frightening how much we today gloss over the EXTREME persecutions the Pilgrims enacted in the name of religion.
This does remind me of Ronald Regan's remark that freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion. In the sense that if I choose no religion, then freedom of religion does guarantee that right. Such a freedom of religion does not mean that I should never have to be exposed to religion in public life, but it does mean that I have the right to practice (or fail to practice) what ever religious belief -- Christian or other -- I choose or choose not to follow. I have the right to be free of coercion in this dimension of life. There are those who just cannot tolerate that idea. Somehow, I notice, we are becoming a nation of little toleration of difference . . . any difference. We need to find a positive way to build toleration, but I don't know what it is right
"[10] If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us." --West Virgina Board of Ed v. Barnette (1943)
And even in cases, since overturned, where the court limits freedom of speech:
"The First Amendment, and the Fourteenth through its absorption of the First, sought to guard against repetition of those bitter religious struggles by prohibiting the establishment of a state religion and by securing to every sect the free exercise of its faith." Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940)
“A Christian sees much in Islam which reminds him of his own religion, but he sees it in the extremely distorted form. He finds ideas and statements of belief clearly related to those of his own religion, but which nevertheless, turns off into strangely different paths.
Islam is so familiar to us that we pass it by with careless indifference with which we ignore that which we know and know only too well. And yet it is not familiar enough to us to enable us really to understand its uniqueness, and the spirit by which it has won its own place in the sphere of religion, a place which it still rightly occupies by virtue of its very existence.
We find it much easier to understand religions that are completely new and strange to us: as for example, the religions of India and China. A greater degree of insight and of spiritual freedom is required of him who would understand the Arabian Prophet and his book
Tor Andrae in his book
Mohammed: Tha Man and His Faith
But there is also an element of ethnocentrism that is bundled up into this as well. As Christianity is largely a European religion...and Islam is largely an African and near-Asian one. The same ethnocentrism that fuels a lot of anti-Semitism.
However those who know Islam understand that it is part of the same religious family as Judaism and Christianity.
Dante Alighieri in his epic poem, "The Inferno"....like a good 13th Century Christian insisted that Rome was the one true church. But in consigning the prophet Mohammed to H*ll in his poem..he did not put Mohammed among the Heretics and other teachers of false religion....
...but instead put Mohammed among the Sowers of Discord for sowing DIVISION among the worshippers of God. In fact, Mohammed's symbolic punishment was being hacked by demons with swords for having done the same to the body of the Church.
Unless the Western civilization intellectually, socially, politically and economically, and the Christian church theologically, can learn to treat other men with fundamental respect, these two in their turn will have failed to come to terms with the actualities of the 21st century.
The problems raised in this are, of course, as profound as anything touching on Islam. The reality is that Islam and the West share a common tradition rather than a clash of civilization. Differences of opinions do exist and must exist. After all, there are huge differences of opinion among the Westerners too. From the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims have recognised the common tradition of the Abrahamic faiths. But the many in the west refuse to accept it.
Today, some Muslims are beginning to turn against the cultures of the People of the Book which have humiliated and despised them. A rejection for instance to build a mosque near WIC site may help to turn the radicals against the West more. They have even begun to justify their hatred in the name of Islam which vehemently condemns hatred, pride and arrogance
The West should understand that a healthy and functioning Islam is crucial because it helps Muslim people to cultivate decent values and ideals which people in the west cherish..
The fact that some Christian sees much of Islam as distorted form of their own religion maybe true for some, but one may say the catalyst for the onset of the crusader was more or less proselytism and domination of Christianity.
Even in the secular culture of the West, there is the old demonological perception of Islam has survived and has indeed been greatly strengthened. Some liberal intellectuals have seemed to be intent on translating the vision of Pope Innocent III into modern terms. Do Muslims dare to suggest that blasphemy should be outlawed?
If they do so, Muslims have themselves might be accused of blaspheming other Abrahamic religions.
As a result Islam has once again found itself treated, at times, at least, as though it were the very incarnation of blasphemy, the Beast of the Apocalypse, which must be subjugated in a Holy war of words fought this time not by Christian crusaders but by crusading unbelievers like Islam’s critics on this forum who think that Muslims should not be allowed to have the same constitutional rights as the Christians.
I think way too many Christians think they have to hate certian folks that they believe their god hates as well. In fact, the god of the bible hates quite alot....
God's avatar in the New Testament taught just the opposite.
The dangers of such political and cultural scapgoating should not be underestimated. The world is not blind to the fact that in turn, America has for many years been commonly portrayed as the Great Satan and this may lead to the fact that some Muslims like the Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans and now Libyans fall into the same trap. Hence there are dangers associated with this sort of clash of intolerance.
I say, "Yeah right, they just love you to death."
However, I'd like to address the title "Religious Freedom is Only for Christians?" Well, yea, where have you been? Much of the American public has no problem with infringing upon the religious freedom of not only Muslims but atheists, Wiccans, and others. It's my impression that Zimmerman probably would only write this article when Muslims are discriminated against and Zimmerman doesn't at all protest "under God" in the Pledge, discrimination against non-believers, Wiccans, etc in the military, etc. If I'm wrong and Zimmerman does, that is a pleasant surprise and he is an exception to the rule, as most Christians act as if they have no real problem with church-state separation violations and infringing upon the liberty of non-Christians.
Really, why all these articles complaining about Islamophobia but not about intolerance against atheists and others?
Wiccan military personnel have the Pentacle on their headstones in Arlington.
I don't see the point bragging and grandstanding about my faith, because to me, it's a very private thing. It's the extremist whackjobs who are the ones promoting the idea America is a 'Christian nation', a concept I find sickening. As long as we allow these crazy evangelicals to beat that idea into our heads with their bibles, that's the way it's going to be.
Meaning his suggestion is not the evil of Islam anti-exceptionalism but the far greater evil of assuming that ALL OF ISLAM could be considered a criminal enterprise. Not to mention the hubris that a 1,500 year old religion has culminated in simply being an antithesis to a 250 year old country.