Editor, heal thyself
Had a fascinating conversation with the letters editor of a leading Australian paper, who rang up and wanted to discuss editing and printing a letter I'd sent in. The original letter is as follows:
Dear editor,
Your recent insightful opinion piece (July 21) fails at its key point. That is to say, he has quite rightly pointed out how the secular media has completely misunderstood the “war on terror” by refusing to acknowledge that it is best viewed as a religious war. But the analysis fails to probe past this point to see that while the categories may be religious, the deeper issue is the corruption and hatred that is basic to human nature ...
This corruption is distressingly demonstrated by Islamists who decapitate their prisoners. It is also demonstrated by US army officers who demand blood and quote, of all things, the entry of Jesus to Jerusalem as a justification for their killing. Have they forgotten that Jesus won his victory over sin and evil not by killing but by being crucified, so that we might be forgiven? At least the Islamists are being true to their teaching; the Christians who kill on religious grounds are guilty of the most dreadful distortion. They are not fundamentalists but deviants.
Yours sincerely (etc)
He was quite happy with it, except for that one phrase “At least the Islamists are being true to their teaching”. He raised two objections, which were
- It was a broad brush statement;
- He felt uneasy about people making comments about groups they didn't belong to.
It reveals starkly the difficulty that the secularist mind has in comprehending a view which argues that one religion might be true and another false; all religions are not the same, and will express their beliefs in ways that are radically opposed.
As he was the editor, I could hardly complain about him doing his job and editing. He didn't have to phone at all. But afterwards I reflected that if the same principles he put for removing the offending sentence were applied to his newspaper, that publication would be some 60 pages of blank newspaper with a lot of paid advertising in between.