A STRATEGY FOR DEFEATING BOOK BURNING

Unless you have been lost in the wilderness for the last week, you have heard about Terry Jones the pastor of the very small church in Florida who somewhere got the idea that burning the Koran would be a good idea and instead of letting that fleeting thought pass, he decided to act on it. Now normally this would not have been a problem because it would have been contained in his little community. No one would have heard of it. No one would have made much of it.

With the hundreds of thousands of Christian pastors all over the planet doing things every single week, almost none of it is ever considered newsworthy. And they actually do lots of good things —from helping the poor, visiting the sick, providing inspiration for people who and down and discouraged and so on. But none of that hits the news. None of that is considered newsworthy (!) (which is a real shame that the Media around the world is so negatively and catastrophically oriented).

But just let some not-so-bright pastor talk about burning a book, and presto, News-Worthiness! of such a high degree that every radio station and every television station and every cable outlet, and every blog and internet website carries it. And why have we heard so much about Terry Jones? Well, it’s obvious, the News Media think they can make money that way, fan a controversy, and get new readers or viewers. And of course, they then take no responsibility to being a part of it!

The other key contributing factor to all of this is an invisible one— the invisible attitude and frame of mind called fundamentalism, both the pastor’s and those who are cursing him. Fundamentalism is an attitude driven by the belief that a symbol is not just a symbol, it is more, it is “real.” This is the failure to distinction map and territory. The mental map of ideas, feelings, and beliefs about something is confused and over-identified with what’s real —the territory.

Personally, I think it is a stupid idea to burn books and that stupidity is having a field day in all of this. Yet Jones has no monopoly on stupidity. The curses against hm, the protests, the threats to kill him, and the over-identification of him with “America” — all of that is just as stupid. Ultimately, the pastor is just burning a book. In response they burn the American flag or the Bible. Yet all of these things are just symbols. And that’s all.

Even though I wish he wouldn’t burn books, Jones certainly has the right to burn any book or flag or anything else if it is his. In a democracy that’s called freedom. And in a democracy people have the right and responsibility to live by their own values and beliefs. That’s why we don’t allow ourselves or others to become dictators of another’s conscience. Instead we treat

people as adults who are responsible for their own actions.

Here’s the craziness in the current conflict: Every Moslem who gets stirred up, provoked, and reactive to Jones is actually letting Jones control them! By dis-empowering themselves over the symbolism, they are empowering him to push their buttons. Confusing map and territory, and getting serious about this, they are endowing Jones with a whole lot of power, authority, and influence. And that’s the problem from that side: they are taking him serious. They are giving to this unknown person his 15 minutes of fame and they are making him more important than I think he deserves!

My recommendation: ignore him. Don’t let him push your buttons. Set higher frames in your mind to his provocative actions. As long as you respond at his level — pushing back and trying to make him stop or calling him names or insulting him, you are coming down to his level and letting him win! When you unplug your buttons and view it as a silly choice on his part, you make him and his actions less import ant, and redundant.

The Koran, the Bible, the Torah and every other religious book is just that— a book, a symbol. It is just writing about spiritual issues— and so is a map, not the territory, not reality.