Muslims Do Animal Sacrifice, Part Three

Dear Readers,

Happy anniversary to Telemoonfa Time! I have been blogging now for a whole year, and it’s been really cool. I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy knowing that other people enjoy my blog too.

If you want to be an official follower of my blog, then all you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on “follow this blog.” That way, you’ll get notified whenever Telemoonfa Time is updated. (If you haven’t set up a google/blogger account thing, you might have to do that in order to become a bona fide “follower” of Telemoonfa Time.) And no need to worry about lapses in your Telemoonfa Time amusement- your courageous author plans to keep blogging on a semi-regular basis indefinitely! Hopefully I’ll keep writing interesting things and hopefully interesting things keep happening to me. But even if all of a sudden everything around and within me becomes excruciatingly mundane, I’ll keep blogging! Hooray!

Speaking of interesting things, I’ve been substitute teaching a little bit lately and I already have some interesting stories from that. Maybe I’ll write about them some other time. I only substitute taught around the Flagstaff Unified School District for 6 days, and now NAU is starting up again, so it’s time to go back to college. I’m still taking a bunch of English classes and I’m teaching English 105. I should graduate from NAU in May 2010 with a MA in General English Studies. Or I might quit after this semester and just start teaching English at a high school somewhere in Arizona, probably. Who knows?

Moving on, it sounds like some people don’t like my politically incorrect and insensitive blog post, under the title “Muslims Do Animal Sacrifice!” Let me say a few things about that story I wrote. It’s kind of a sarcastic, exaggerated, outrageous story. Of course I know that Muslims don’t really steal people’s pets in the night and sacrifice them, and of course I know that Muslims don’t shoot people that come to mosques looking for their lost pet rabbits. I think I was trying to be sensational, you know? I sort of thought the whole story was sarcastic and silly. Like, can you imagine a Christian parent telling this story to children to teach them about Muslims? That’s outrageous! The story is completely immature and irresponsible and messed up, but I think that’s what makes the story cool, sort of.

Anyway, Muslims really do perform animal sacrifice, currently, a lot, and I think that’s something that people ought to know. I remember how shocked I was when I heard about that for the first time a month or two ago. I mean, I had read a tiny little bit of the Koran, I had heard about Islam on the news a lot, I had talked with a few people about the religion, and talked briefly with a few Muslims in real life, and… I just wonder why I had never heard about that before. I wonder why animal sacrifice had never come up. And I wonder how many Americans know that Muslims do animal sacrifice.

When I hear the term “animal sacrifice”, it’s like, “whoa!” that’s some crazy tribal/ superstitious/ Old Testament stuff from a bygone era, you know? A bygone era when men’s maps had lots of fog and sea monsters. Animal sacrifice just seems severely antiquated and superstitious to us modern Americans, right?

Does animal sacrifice seem barbaric to you? Or is “barbaric” too strong of a word?

Of course, I am pro-animal sacrifice in theory. God told lots of people to kill animals in religious ceremonies in the Old Testament and in the Book of Mormon, so I think that animal sacrifice is a good idea, but I also understand that lots of people think that animal sacrifice is not such a good idea. Personally, I’m glad that God stopped asking Christians to do animal sacrifice and replaced the law of Moses with the higher law (see the Sermon on the Mount in the early chapters of Matthew) but if God decided to reinstate animal sacrifice, then I’d get out my machete and start chopping off some heads, you know what I mean? (Animal heads, of course. I would chop off animal heads, not human heads.)

Since animal sacrifice is so surprising, and since Islam is such a big religion, I wonder why not a lot of people are aware that Muslims do animal sacrifice. And remember, Islam has a billion members. (1,000,000,000 is a large number. According to Wikipedia, there are between 1 and 1.8 billion Muslims in the world. That’s a fifth or a sixth of the entire population of the planet.)

I also want to say that I know that extreme, violent, radical Islam is not the norm in the Muslim world. I’m sure tons of Muslims are friendly and wonderful and great neighbors and faithful.

I actually just talked to a Muslim English 105 teacher this morning, and I asked him about animal sacrifice, and he said that he sacrificed some animals just last month. I think he said that boys start sacrificing animals when they’re 9 and girls start when they’re 12. But don’t quote me on that. He said if you don’t have the money to buy an animal to sacrifice, then that’s fine, you don’t need to participate that year. I guess Muslims sacrifice animals once a year, every December. Um, also, one cool thing he told me was that when they kill an animal, one third of the meat is supposed to go to needy people, one third is supposed to go to your extended family, and one third is supposed to go to yourself and your immediate family. So that was cool. And the Muslim guy I talked with this morning is a really nice guy. We’ve had a few friendly conversations here and there.

So I’m really not a cruel guy, I think, and, most of the time I have good intentions. I do not think I am a dispenser of hate speech via this blog.

But one more thing about radical Islam: There really are extreme, violent Muslims out there. I’m talking about Al Queda and Hamas and Hezbollah and other terrorist/ terrorist-friendly groups, and these groups use a lot of Islamic doctrine to defend their violent actions.

And I’m afraid that Islamic extremist thought and anti-Semitism is spreading. The other day in a protest in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, there were Jews and Muslims yelling things back at each other. They were arguing about the Israeli/Hamas conflict going on right now. One of the Muslim women in the protest yelled to the Jewish crowd across the street, “Go back to the ovens!” Yikes! Did you hear about that? (Here’s the article: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,477450,00.html )

Maybe you’ll say, “that was just one crazy lady. Not all Muslims are like that. Islam is basically a religion of peace.” Well, even if 1% of Muslims are really radical like that lady was, that means that there’s (hmm… what’s 1 % of a billion… ) 10 million radical Muslims. My numbers may be way wrong, um, maybe the real percentage of radical Muslims is something more like .1% or .01%… I wish there was some sort of world census where every Muslim filled out a survey and checked one of two boxes: either “I am a violent, radical Muslim” or, “I’m a normal, peaceful Muslim.”

Radical Islam is a serious threat to America and the United Kingdom and democracy and the nation of Israel and Jews, not to mention women’s rights and animal rights and homosexual rights. A good documentary to watch about radical Islam is called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” You can watch a half-hour version of the documentary of it free online, at the other end of this link: http://www.obsessionthemovie.com/

Also, maybe some of you cringe at the thought of me teaching school, because maybe you think I’m poisoning students with my right-wing right-wingity. But I think I’m fair in class. I really don’t talk about religion and politics much at all in my class. And part of the reason I don’t want to reveal my identity in this blog is because I don’t want my students to see some of my radical political and religious opinions. (I’m not sure if I would call my views radical, but I can see how other people would call my ideas radical.)

OK, well, that’s enough for now.

See you later.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa.