If you delete the Koran from your hard drive, will Lindsey Graham get his knickers in a knot?

When I’m at church and the pastor calls out a verse to read, I don’t open a book. I’m not even carrying a book. These days, I’ll pull out my phone and tap the Olive Tree Bible app icon. I’ve got the entire Bible right there, plus some commentaries and other stuff. If someone took my phone and burned it, I’d be angry, and they would owe me a new phone. If they put the same file on their own phone and burned that, why should I care? It’s their phone, and their problem. It’s not the phone that matters, but the ideas that the phone happens to hold.

The Muslims who keep rioting and murdering over Koran burnings are fetishizing technology that has not always existed, and which at some point will be obsolete. They’re not respecting or even defending ideas. They’ve made it clear that they hate ideas that they disagree with, to the point of chopping off your head if you don’t submit to them. They’re not defending the existence of the Koran itself, since there’s no global effort to burn every Koran everywhere, and the information contained in any copy of the Koran is independent of the material in which it is stored. And, not every Koran that’s ever been printed still exists. Do riots ensue every time an old Koran gets canned?

The rioters and their leaders ban ideas as a matter of routine whenever and wherever they have the power. Try starting a Baptist church in Saudi Arabia if you’d like to test their tolerance. Better yet, name it Mecca Bible Church and BOOM! If you reject their ideas and favor other ideas, they’ll take you to court and sentence you to die. Afghan Christians keep having to flee to Europe because of this very fact. The murderous rioters are not respecting religion, even, or the divine. They’re taking it upon themselves to protect their god against some perceived human affront.The prophet Elijah would have had some fun with them for that.

What will the rioters do or say when the only copies of the Koran that exist outside a museum (probably a Museum to Tolerance) are in digital format? Will it be a capital crime to push the delete key? What happens if your hard drive or phone or whatever the Koran file is stored on gets wiped or crashes?

I’m no fan of book burning as a rule. I think it’s obscene when we mutilate Mark Twain or other literary classics. I wish more in the West would really read the Koran and get what Suras 2 through 9 actually mean in the present context. But offensive stunts have a way of being clarifying sometimes, and in the Koran burning stunt we learned that Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Harry Reid are weak sisters when it comes to defending freedom of speech. We learned that Hamid Karzai has become a very problematic ally, if he’s still an ally at all. We learned the speed of communication from Florida to Afghanistan — about 10 days, filtered through a great deal of dishonest brokering that has resulted in the killing of about 20, including two US military. And we learned that some people value paper above human life because of the arrangement of ink stains upon that paper.