This one is courtesy of a local (Dallas area) Catholic priest and the Dallas Morning News. The priest was responding to a parishioner who during communion, yelled at him:
“Father, you forgot to say, ‘Kill all the Muslims!’”
In response, he gave a sermon on hate the following Sunday, which was reprinted in today’s Dallas Morning News under the same title as this diary:
Father Joshua Whitfield's sermon
I strongly encourage everyone to read the whole thing, but I’ll include a few excerpts here. He starts out by discussing the civil rights movement of the 1960s before mentioning the “Kill all the Muslims” parishioner from the previous Sunday.
He makes a very blunt statement to those who feel as this guy does:
Now, I am a minister of Jesus Christ and a preacher of his gospel, and so in his name, let me be clear: if you agree with that sentiment — “Father, you forgot to say, ‘Kill all the Muslims’” — then this may not be the place for you.
He calls out cable news:
Hatred is born of a small, distorted, bitter view of the world. If, whenever I visit an old person in his or her home, they have the television turned on to cable news, I know that I will find an old man or old woman bitter and depressed because they’re watching spiritual poison.
And, yes, Fox News is the worst of the bunch, but I think that he was right not to call Fox out by name, because that would have led to his comments being dismissed as “liberal partisan bias”. And, in fact, while Fox News may be the most purely distilled poison of the lot, I do agree that constant consumption of any cable news channel (or talk radio, for that matter) is “spiritual poison”. It’s all people arguing, fear-mongering, and just a hugely negative view of the world.
He then notes those who consider themselves experts on what Muslims really believe:
It seems a lot of Christians have become Islamic scholars lately — they’ve read a Facebook post, watched a video on YouTube, maybe read a book about it. They barely know Christianity, but they know what Islam is —it’s evil, it’s hateful, they tell me.
But then I ask them, “What about Mohamed Bouslimani?”
“Who’s that?” they ask.
He was the sheik in Algeria killed [in 1993] because he refused to issue a fatwa.
“I will give you all my blood before I issue a fatwa which will justify the spilling of one drop of innocent Algerian blood,” he said.
You’ve probably never heard of him — of course not — because our view of the world is shaped by news that has become entertainment, by news that has to sell advertising; and stories of peace do not sell.
I was raised Catholic, but fell away from the Church decades ago. And, in general, my perception of any branch of Christianity has gotten rather negative in recent years. Seeing things like this sermon serves as a good reminder that those who proclaim their Christianity the loudest are not represent of their fellow Christians.