Garland, TX Shooting - May 2015 Religious and Spiritual discussions are welcome here, but be respectful - everyone believes their religion is more right, and no one believes exactly the same.

[Neo]

Some of you may have heard about this especially if you're in the DFW group - others, probably not...

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/03/us/mohamm ... index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/04/us/garlan ... index.html

Apparently over the weekend, there was "free speech event" with a "contest" for the best drawing of Muhammad held at a public building in Garland, TX. Two people with assault rifles, one of whom identifying with ISIS, attempted to assault the event, but were shot dead. Read the news articles for more details...

I'm not sure what to say on this subject that hasn't already been said about other events like it in the past...but to me, there are two sides to this whole thing - and both of them are the wrong side of everything.

In my opinion, free-speech or not, it's disrespectful to knowingly antagonize another person's beliefs. Everyone at that conference knew what they were doing wouldn't be tolerated by the people they were aiming it at, and they had no businesses attempting to draw another religion's figurehead. It is a 100% certainty that they did not believe in the religion, so they can't claim it was their own religious event - and anyone who did believe in it would have been forbidden from drawing it. From my view, they would have gotten what they deserved if the gunmen made it through.

On the other side of the coin though, people of a religion need to understand that the rules of their religion don't apply to everyone - they only apply to anyone who wants to take part in that faith. If it was ok to kill people who don't share in your beliefs, the crusades would still be going on today as "a thing" and it's doubtful that any other religions would have made it through all the centuries since to today.

Personally, I don't understand what motivates some people to do this as grown adults. When I was a kid, I held similar beliefs that there is only one right religion and everyone else was literally "evil". That is complete smurf-poo in my view today, where I hold that there are no right religions, and that the choice to escalate a historical document and its characters to a supernatural level is a misunderstood interpretation of the text. It wasn't until I let go of my views on religion that I was able to attempt to see things from an outside perspective where both sides are wrong in how they're behaving...and it makes me sad for the future of humanity...and its past.

[DMoney]

I agree....both sides of that whole situation were wrong. At the same time, I believe the "contest" did have the right to do that if they wanted to, and the muslims had a right to respectfully and legally protest if they wanted to (obviously they weren't respectful nor did things legally).

This situation brought up a lot of discussion on the "Book of Mormon" play with friends of mine. Essentially, we could view this the same way Muslims viewed that contest. But for some reason this is more acceptable to the world. Why? Mostly because we're Mormon and it's more acceptable to make fun of Mormons and we won't come out to kill you. So...if you think this contest was wrong, how do you view other events or activities that make fun of other religions?

[Neo]

Personally, I've never seem the Book of Mormon play, and am not really a can of the south park creators. I don't have any other events that make fun of religion coming to mind. I would think, in general it's just not nice to claim belief in one thing and then turn around and make fun of someone else's slightly different belief because it's different than yours.

I can't speak to the creators of that BoM play, but I can see someone like Seth MacFarlane making fun of all religion because he doesn't believe in any of it... But in the Garland case, there's a pretty good chance the people involved in that were only insulting one religion specifically, not all religions.