To burn or not to burn the Koran?

That is the question!
apparently...
and what a hot little question…
a license for zealots...
to hit every street corner…
with the religious equivalent of road rage…
no matter the outcome of the proposed street theater…
lets honk our horns at that religion over there!
it’s trying to cut in line!
lets seethe…
lets turn the world into one big f*cking religious traffic jam…
lets imagine ramming into all those people that we really really hate…
like bumping cars…
now get out your lighters…
and lets start burning!

but can we stop with the Q’uran?
lets burn EVERY religious book that was ever invoked to start a war…
or rationalize an invasion…
or justify an act of terror…
or promote intolerance…
or serve as the backbone of an empire…
or bless an occupation…
or bolster a colonial system…
or help sustain oppression.

now we can start a serious bonfire…
really generate some light...
with the Old and New Testaments…
the Torah and Bahagavad Gita…
the I-Ching and the Upanishads…
the Tao Te Ching and the Book of the Dead…
the Vedas and the Pentateuch…
the Analects and the Kojiki…
the Diamond Sutra and Dianetics...
surely they've all been used…
at one time or another to do something bad…
OH C’mon, more like…
LOTS OF REALLY HORRIBLE THINGS…
but burning the books won’t be enough,
we’ll have to torch all the churches and temples and mosques and shrines…
and monasteries and pagodas and convents and madrasses…
and cathedrals and stupas and meeting houses and basilicas too…
any building that ever was or could be used to house any kind of religious text…
so no more problem with that Mosque in downtown Manhattan …
no sense in building it at all if it’s just going to get burnt down later…

still, this does not seem enough…
we probably need to burn every religious person just to be safe…
anybody who might remember what was in any of those books we just burned…
cause lets face it…
if they can remember what was in the books…
then they’re going to write it all down again…
and so we’ll probably have to burn all the believers too,
anybody who even read any of those religious texts …
because any one of them could become the source for re-publishing all that filth…

but maybe religious books are not the only culprit…
most books have probably been used in some way to cause some kind of suffering…
no matter the subject…
COOKBOOKS for example…
they’ve probably led to murders…
because, you know, they suggest the use of knives to cut things up…
but any knife that will cut up an onion or potato can also slice up a human…
which gets you to wondering…
which cookbooks in particular led to the more famous serial killers?

so we’re probably going to have to set all the libraries ablaze…
and burn all the writers too…
and anybody who has ever read anything written by any of those writers…
because any one of them could suddenly write it all down again…
words that will get used by somebody to rationalize some act of violence or cruelty…

and so it seems, finally…
that we’re going to have no choice but to burn billions of people…
everybody except the illiterate apparently…
and the only efficient way to do that…
is going to be an all-out nuclear holocaust!

so lets pit Pakistan against India…
Israel against Iran…
North Korea against South Korea…
China against Japan…
Russia against the U.S…
and who knows, maybe we can even get France and England dueling again...
and then we’ll go to the United Nations and start hurling insults at each other…
you know, way below the belt stuff…
like “your mother wears army boots” and “your father smells of elderberries”…
and then we’ll all push all of our big red buttons all at the same time…

and then there’ll be nothing more to argue about!

God… or whatever name you want to apply…
will be back at the helm...
completely…
without any questioning…
and without any heretics…