Cloudy Thinking

While “reading the Internet” a week or two ago, I stumbled across what seemed like an odd combination of offers. One could request a free Holy Bible, or, from a different source, a Koran, the Muslim holy scripture. Since I was raised as a Christian, there are several Bibles in my home, all in “like new” condition, since I’ve not read the Bible since I was a teenager.

On a whim, I “clicked through” to request a free Koran (Quran). About fifty milliseconds after I hit ENTER to make my request (it was FREE right? How could I resist?) I thought about the possible consequences once various Three Letter Agencies (FBI, CIA, DIA) see that I’ve ordered this book. After further reflection, here’s my letter to those who may be interested.

OPEN LETTER TO FBI and CIA

I have a confession: In a moment of personal weakness, I excercised my rights and orderd a book you may find “interesting.”

Recently, I requested a FREE copy of the Koran/Quran. Fortunatelyit has not arrived yet. If you can intercept it (how hard would that be?) you will save me and your operatives time and energy. I will stop feeling guilty because I excercised my freedom, and you will not need to interogate me.

Ordering this FREE scripture might be considered unusual and therefore questionable. I am not a religious scholar. Yes, I am reading a book by A. K. M. Adams about Postmodern Biblical Critcisim, but that’s a weak excuse at best. (And man, that book is some tough reading!) You I both know that while I think Christianity is a great belief system, I routinely talk about how there are several great religions, For example, Chevy vs. Ford, BMW vs. Mercedes, Harley vs. all other motorcycles, Porche vs. Corvette, Toyota vs. Honda.

At work, rather than saying “We need a “Come to Jesus” meeting,” I’ll say “We need a “Come to Buddha” meeting.”

I make comparisons between programming languages and great world religions. Just as the world has Protestants and Catholics (under the Christian rubric), there are Jews, those who believe in Shinto and yes, Buddha. Likewise, we have multiple programming and scripting lanuages: C++, Python, JAVA, Ruby, Perl, SmallTalk, SNOBOL, and don’t forget Visual Basic for Applcations.

(My God loves Basic prgramers just as much as those who insist on writing BASH shell scripts.)

While feeling guilty about having ordered Quran/Koran, I stopped and said to myself, “Wait a minute, Doesn’t it strike you as more than a bit odd that sombody was offering FREE Koran/Qurans?”

Then the probverbial light switched on.

YOU GUYS are no doubt behind this “too good to be true” offer of a FREE Quran/Koran. You are trying to flush out nascent Muslims who otherwise look like middle aged, overweight geeks who write blogs.

I thought I was merely satisfying a mild intellectual curiosity. But you knew better. You uncovered my sedition before I even knew it existed. I expected the Koran/Quran (like the Iraq war) would be a “tough slog” (to quote Donald Rumesfeld.) Little did I suspect I might become a SUSPECT.

Let’s make this easy. Let me turn myself in. Please do NOT roll the black SUVs with dark tinted windows. Maybe while in prison I’ll start reading the Bible again.

Best regards,
Ron K. Jeffries

p.s. Please assign several agents to watch my blog EVERY DAY. I love it when my bog stats counting “unique vistors” zoom up, as they have this month. THANK YOU, Adam Curry!

p.s.s. Forget about intercepting the paper copy of the Koran/Quran. I just “A9′d” this link which offers a FREE electronic Quran/Koran It shows eight translations, side by side. Talk about a tough slog…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 9:16 pm and is filed under OpEd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.