Just a book?

Looking around the right-handed blogosphere, the controversy over the US Army's... creative approach to Quranic learning has now gone through several phases.

The first was to claim Newsweek was making it all up to embarass the Americans. This was momentarily credible after Newsweek revealed that it's report was single-sourced (the classic example of sloppy journalism). Of course, thanks to a number of reports (many kept in the limelight by bloggers, thank you thank you) dating back to 2002 involving other incidents of abuse of the Quran, it's now seemingly fashionable to say that the Quran is "just a book", and therefore not worth our time or outrage.

As a militant secularist, I feel deeply conflicted in coming to the aid of any religious fundamentalism, but can you imagine the raging firestorm that would be ignited if Christians were being kept in a prison camp off the shores of Oman while having copies of the Bible torn and desecrated? Bush would go nuclear before Bill O'Reilly finished screaming.

On the other hand, this kind of talk might be encouraging. I would welcome the idea that the Right was realizing the religions were just made-up stories we tell ourselves so we don't wet our beds during a thunderstorm. Except that I don't think this is what we're doing. Instead, I think your average right-winger's religious views could be summarized by Stephen Colbert's line on The Daily Show last night - "unlike them, our God is real". When they're browner people of the earth with funny head-towels and beards, "it's just a book". When it's a white guy with a funny hat and a wacky car, he's The Pope, Bitch!

And even if you're equally disgusted with all forms of religious extremism, to describe any religious text as "just a book" in an attempt to minimize the damage it can cause is ridiculous. To my knowledge, Luther's 95 Theses were much smaller than "a book", but they led to the Catholic-Protestant wars, which almost certainly killed a larger portion of European society than World War I.

In any case, the right-wing has never been known for staying on one talking point too long, so let's sit back and watch where they go next.

My bet: Bush apologizes for the Quran desecration, but says it wouldn't happen if "You people would all speak English like Jesus did".