Homegrown Extremists

This photo has been floating about the internet for a couple years but this is the first I've seen it  "Liked" by a friend on Facebook which appeared on my radar.

We are worried about terrorists getting a hold of nuclear weapons but what would happen if some trigger happy Americans got a hold of them first? Now, I'm not saying all Americans want to nuke the Middle East and the same goes for Muslims. We are talking about extremists and extremist thinking (or lack thereof). There are extremists who would love nothing more than to wipe Mecca off the map. Shoot first and recover from an economic catastrophe, oil shortage, and environmental (dare I say planetary by the size of this impact we're looking at nuclear winter) annihilation later. All to settle a score. If you can look at this photo and not feel disgusted I don't think I could consider you human let alone a "friend". Here's the link to the Facebook page which posted this picture if you want to peruse through the comments. I posted this photo not because I feel I have better morals than these people but to demonstrate how poisonous a twisted ideology can be if left to fester. 11 years later and some Americans feel justice has not been served even though we have taken out Osama bin Laden.

This is not justice. To quote one of my favorite moments of the Bible Abraham challenged God

"Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Gen 18:25

We've come a long way from OT morality, or at least most of us have. Loving your enemy is hard, but a way towards that goal is to understand them. Once you understand them you will find they're no different than we are. There is no They, there is no Other.   We can be better than this. We are better than this. Or at least we should teach our children to be better than us.