Ed Garren wrote:

    I'm sure the dark side of the force will be all over this like a bad  
    smell, so I thought I'd send this out so you can see it for yourself  
    FIRST.
    
    Our president offered a very dignified and gracious greeting to the  
    Islamic world for the beginning of Ramadan, explaining that it is a  
    month long season of fasting, prayer and dignified celebration of the  
    revealing of the Holy Koran to the prophet Mohammed.
    
    While some may respond to this with shock, anger or other negative  
    response, I am personally very pleased that our president has made this 
    gesture of respect towards the Islamic community, a community which for 
    too long has been perceived as being at odds with American values.
    
    My personal experience of Islamic people has been overwhelmingly  
    respectful, gracious, and I have experienced them as deeply spiritual  
    people, who constantly hold their relationship with God at the center of 
    their lives.  Generally they are gracious and humble people, filled with 
    thanksgiving, and always open to being hospitable with strangers in their 
    midst.  It is sad that our previous administration played upon fears and 
    exploited the actions of a very few Muslims, and used their actions as an 
    excuse to demonize an entire religion.
    
    As a Gay man who is also a Christian,  I am painfully aware of how  
    religious extremists in any religion can taint what the outside world  
    sees regarding the entire religion.  The so-called militant clerics in  
    Islam have about as much sanction in the larger faith as Pat Robertson, 
    or the late Jerry Falwell had among main stream Christians.  I would not 
    want all Christians to be judged by the actions and words of a few 
    literalist angry judgmental men, and I suspect it is equally ignorant to 
    cast the majority of Muslims, who are peace loving people, in with the 
    words and deeds of a small and misguided group of angry people.
    
    So, here is the video, and afterward is a Wikipedia link about Ramadan.
    
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK9ThwtxzfY
    
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan
    
    Regards, Ed Garren

Ed,

As well-intentioned as your communication starts, we here in the younger 
generation don't find that platitudes to faith -- any faith -- are actually 
good things from our politicians.

We look at all the bad things that are done in the name of faith and wish our 
politicians would just talk to us about real issues and real problems, here 
in this world, and not in an imaginary next world that involves faith.

We gain nothing from faith except credulity, for they are exactly equal. 

Those who believe in credulity like to say that there are good things that 
come from faith.

In fact, nothing good comes from it.  If there ever were a situation 
that credulity would have by chance led to an acceptable outcome, a healthy 
skepticism that weighed independent evidence would always have been at least 
as good.  In times where there is not enough information to fully weigh all 
options, the precautionary principle supplements skepticism -- if the risk 
of the unknown is too great compared to the possibility of reward, we can 
still make decisions as matters of probability and educated guessing rather 
than explicitly giving up our mental faculities.

Thus, in all cases, credulity should have no place in politics.

To get back to relevance, your email highlights a "good" thing from religion 
that really isn't all that good:

That some people might have found an inner peace from faith.

The problem is that the inner peace is really only obscurity.  That "good"
inner peace is the very same inner peace that leads a suicide bomber on the 
death march of absolute truth with full confidence that what they are doing
will actually lead to some "greater peace", sometimes here, others in death.

So what you preach is a philosophy not really of peace, but of obscurity.

That obscurity leads through ignorance, randomly, to chaos, instability, 
violence, atrocities, and death in general.  That this happens to all 
religions shows us that no religion facilitates a "relationship with god" 
whether you believe that's even possible or not.

Obscuritants may come from a god-head or a civil religion like Stalinism.  
But with skepticism and glasnost, all our faiths, religious and 
secular, can prevent jihads, gulags, and any other form of totalitarian 
mind-control from redirecting our destiny from idea-directed for the idea 
in-and-of-itself, toward a more promising future, a path of ideas rooted in
the concepts of self-direction, self-awareness, and self-determination.

It's those concepts that make all other ideas possible and open doors to 
the many possibilities that lay in our common future as humankind.

You associate dignity and grace to this platitude to faith.

On the contrary, there is nothing dignified about blind faith and 
nothing graceful about darkness.

If what we were to see instead was a call to enlightenment -- an explanation 
that we should be aware of world religions while at the same time reiterating 
how to avoid the path that radical opacity does to the human mind -- to be 
skeptical not just of Islam, but of all ideas that seek to perpetuate 
themselves as matters of faith rather than evidence, we can build a society 
immune from religious violence by demonstrating by example how much better 
is a rational society based on open access to information.

We need to be the change that we wish to seek.  The whole world is watching us.

It's time for us to show the path from darkness to enlightenment.

Acceptance in the name of pluralism alone should not ignore the danger of the 
ideas that instead work to undercut acceptance and pluralism itself.

There comes times when we have to draw a line and make an ethical stand.

An opportunity was missed.  This should have been one of those times.