Nine dead and 81 wounded. This is the bloody aftermath of anti-American ndash; or, sooner, anti-Christian and anti-Western ndash; riots in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar City that were provoked by the desecration of the Quran by Terry Jones, an obscure U.S.
pastor from Florida. Burning books is always a bad thing, but to burn a book that has been venerated for a considerable portion of human history seems simply uncivilized.
Indeed, it follows a certain logic of idolatry: worship one’s own icons and destroy those of outsiders.
It has nothing to do with religion. It is rather a modern manifestation of a deeply primitive and even pagan worldview.
What Jones has is not a church, although it is often described as such.
His congregation of 50 to 70 people qualifies it more accurately as a very …