You are in my prayers.

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (Solzhenitsyn)

The entire epistle to the Romans (S/Paul)

probably others in that 2000 years i skipped, but i was sticking with alliteration to verify the truthiness of my comment.

salaamat

I used to work for Turner producing promos/trailers for videos shown on GameTap.com.

Sometimes as a producer you are tasked to make a promo/trailer for a show while it is still being put together. When making a promo/trailer, you use the best stuff you can find from available footage. Sometimes, no matter how good the footage may seem, it gets cut out of the final show.

That is not to say that you did not see a truncated version if a LOT was missing, but I know that I have put something in a trailer that I thought was great just to have it cut.

I am also concerned with the anti-Muslim sentiments being used in the Army and in society. It would be especially hurtful to be denigrated at a time you felt you were serving your country.

John, since the fuller story of Maj. Hasan is still emerging, I’ve held back on one thing I’ve been mulling. If this does turn out to be true, that he did have connections with radical clerics, and he really did go into the army with altruistic ideals but felt excluded after 9/11, we would do well as a nation to see how this incident could teach us about how exclusion can lead to radicalization (on both sides of the divide). That’s also a tricky line to walk, though, because there’s a huge difference between contextualizing someone’s actions and justifying them. I can contextualize violence; that doesn’t mean I agree with it. My experience is that the difference between the two is lost on most.

But: the full story is still emerging. And the bottom line for me is that evil is at work in the world. If we try to pretend like we are “holier than thou,” we’re out of touch. Or, as we say often in worship, “If we say we are without sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”

Whoever it is who destroys lives, whether by economic violence, or by (relatively small-scale) mass murder, or by starting a war, that person is always “one of our own”. We are not permitted to exclude people-who-do-great-evil from “people”. To do so is to presume that we are in a better category of people whose sins are a little less sinny.