Life ? Or...Death ?

I was instructed in my several comparative religion courses and seminars over the past 60 years that all the world's major religions "shared" several basic beliefs.

I was always paricularly entertained by the revelation that Islam recognized Adam, Noah, Moses and Jesus Christ as "prophets"...albeit eclipsed and abridged by Muhammad's revelations from Gabriel, the angel.

I was also instructed that the Qu'ran (which means "recitation" in rough english translation), recognized Jews, Christians and even Zoroastruans as "Peiople of the Book". These "people" are not to be treated harshly in Islamic Governments, according to the Prophet, but are to be taxed more harshly that the followers of Islam.

What, then am I to make of the Islamic Jihadists, the IslamoNazi-Faschista's preoccupation with death?

Throughout the middle east, Africa.and extending to the Indonesian archipelago (population 270 million, 95% Islamic) the most obvious and active Muslims represent mass murder and suicide.

To me, trhey seem to relegate life on this earth as meaningless. And they invite and encourage the world's societies to join them in embracing hatred of life and passion for an end to it.

This leaves Western Civilization, the fountainhead of the Reanaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial and Digital revolutions as the sole crucible for Love of Life and Gratitude for Living.

Or does it?

There are powerful revisionists in academia, in Canada and the European Union, hell-bent on demonizing the cultural giants of the West as "worthless, dead old white men."

Well, I spit upom racism of any kind. The two most eloquent, elegant writers / thinkerts on economic and social freedom in MY country are both black: Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams. Professor Harvey Mansfield of Harvard, our greatest freedom educator, at Harvard, is white, however. You can't win them all.

But these three men, and those of us who savor their every spoken and written opinion, are proclaimers of optimism, of gratitude, of discipline and responsibility.

Life is for the creative, the fanciful, the humorous, the lyrical, the demonstrative, the promising, and the absolutely positively confident.

And those sparks may, finally erase the darkness and despair of those who hijack a faith and mold it into a religion of death.

It may be up to you and yours....

I have a devout Christian neighbor, who pointed to the pictire of the Syrian woman with all the explosives strapped to her chest.

"She claims Malfunction?!!!" he asked. "Give me a break !"

He's right. This Syrian lady's "malfunction" was about like Janet Jackson's "costume malfunction" at the Super Bowl....It was an individual affirmation....

Of LIFE !!!!!