crazy

It appears the charges against the Christian in Afghanistan I discussed a couple of days ago have been dropped. I consider this to be a victory for democracy everywhere, but it sounds as if the charges were dropped because the court decided the guy was crazy, rather than dropping them because it was the correct and just thing to do. I would like to believe that the Afghans read my recent blog and it helped to sway their opinion, but, in truth, I don’t think that many people in the Afghan government read this blog. And my blog was not aimed at them, anyway.

In the story I read about this today, Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying that “we need to be respectful of Afghan sovereignty.”

Wait a minute! Didn’t we go into Afghanistan and put into place the mechanisms for them to “elect” the sitting government? Didn’t the Afghans “choose” to put into place the government that is willing to kill this brother because he believes differently than the religious right in his country? Isn’t Afghan “sovereignty” something we put there in the first place?

Many of you are probably asking, “Jimbo, how many questions can you ask in one paragraph?” And then almost as many of you realize, “Oops. I just did it, too.”

Please cut yourselves some slack. It was Socrates who said, “Unexamined life is not worth living.”

It was the Socratic method to question everything. I’ve always thought you guys were a lot like Socrates, in that regard.

But, let’s get back to the subject at hand. I think it would have been better if the Afghans had said it was okay for this guy to be a Christian and worship his own God, instead of slipping out the back door by saying he was crazy. Perhaps this guy was just “crazy” about his God, and for any Christian that may be a good defense.

I contend that we would be crazy to assume that an Afghan theocracy would have the same separation of church and state that our own democracy enjoys and our constitution requires. We should celebrate the fact that we have that separation and pray we never allow ourselves to sink back to level of the Afghans. We’d be crazy to let that continue to happen here.

Are you with me on this one, or am I just crazy?

At least that is what we believe here in Jimbo’s world.