Someone wrote a letter to the Eugene's Register Guard in response to my letter, mentioning me by name and then listing the obvious yet disingenuous points about how one being born into a culture/religion is not by choice, you're born into it. If you're from a Hindu culture/region, no doubt you'll be born Hindu and raised Hindu, etc. Yet, the letter writer concluded, one should not go to such lengths as the terrorists did in France to protest insults to their beliefs. Duh.
As I said.
The point does seem to be missed. Once you're all grown up and all, with enough intelligence to travel and think and you know, stuff like that, then you're responsible enough to know that your beliefs do not give you any rights over anyone else. It's that simple. Pedantically explaining how "cultures" and "regional religions" are impactful upon a human being ignores the issue.
Letter I wrote, published Sunday, Feb. 1st in the Register Guard:
Letters in the editor’s mailbag from Sunday’s print edition | Opinion | The Register-Guard | Eugene, Oregon: Don’t blame victims of terrorism
Almost as frightening as the psychotics who murder in the name of their god are those who put the onus of terrorist acts on the victims. The two simply do not merit comparison — vicious killers filled with a crazed thirst for death defending a god vs. those who mock or criticize that god.
Apologists attack the victims of Charlie Hebdo for being ... well, it doesn’t matter what they were being. What they weren’t being was murderous in the name of a god.
Letter writers to The Register-Guard have used analogies to support their stance that they are “not Charlie”: Don’t poke a hornet’s nest and expect to not get stung; don’t walk in the woods and expect a grizzly not to attack, etc.
Expecting humans to quell their creativity or suppress their disagreements because it might upset someone is naive.
Those other humans — the ones who kill in defense of a belief — have a choice. Unlike the folksy comparisons of hornets or grizzlies that were born as such, they can choose what to believe. They have a choice on how to behave. They have a choice on how to respond to expressions and opinions different than theirs, regardless of any inanity in those opinions.
Those who don’t see the horrors of humans who thirst for control and think nothing of slaughtering humans so they can gain that control (which is thinly disguised as defense of religion) are complicit in those horrors.
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