A Gift

So yesterday, after a spirited set of tennis at the park with the roommate (he lost his serve halfway through, and to be fair, was feeling the aftereffect of the sleep aid he took the night before, so it was more competitive than the final 6-2 score would indicate), I saw something hanging from the front door. Usually, something in a little hanging bag on the front door like that would be a course catalog/brochure from the local community college, or a flaming bag of poo.

But this was a book, with a green leatherette cover, with a brochure tucked in with it. The faux-gold leaf detail was the first tip, this was a religious tract. Oh goody.

See, we live in what the roommate has called "the most liberal Zip code outside of San Francisco," so we have people of many faiths and races here. I'm not sure if that makes us more fertile recruiting ground for the Jehovah's Witnesses and the other proselytizers or less, but we do get the occasional knock on the door that we have to politely blow off. But it turns out this was different...

Dear Neighbor,

Please accept the enclosed book as a
gift from the Muslim community...

And thus I saw the title "The English Translation of the Message of the Quran." Hmm, this was new.

Then I had a stunning moment of self-awareness (not really stunning, and probably not all that self-aware). The fact that it was the holy text for one religion I don't believe in (Islam) made it somehow better than it being the holy text for another religion I don't believe in (Christianity). Does that make me the kind of namby-pamby liberal that Ann Coulter (who is anything but a Christian) is always on about? I can hear her sneering "oh, sure, they love the Quran, but if it was a Bible, they'd have had some kind of fit." And she'd be entirely missing the point, but she'd also have a grain of truth in there. Because if it had been a bible, I'd have scanned up and down the block to see if the people delivering them were still there, and if so, I'd have jogged my copy back to them and said something charming like "here, don't waste the dead tree on trying to tell me about your invisible man in the sky." But since it wasn't the Bible, I actually set it down on the kitchen table, with absolutely no intention of reading it, but certainly no intention of making a show of tossing it out, either.

So is the Christian Right, which of course really is neither (no, I never will get tired of that joke, why do you ask?) actually correct about me? Or is it simply that complicated but genuine notion that I was raised to be more polite to the neighbors than to my family? The president keeps talking about having more respect for those that disagree with us, and I keep thinking "yeah, what he said" without really considering if I need to do the same.

Sorry, I guess this is one of those posts that raises more questions (1) than it answers (0). But that's what you get for now.