Utah matters

We have this guy, Sulejmen Talovic, who went to a Utah mall and shot up the place. A Bosnian Serb refuge. Perhaps an un-peaceful muslim. If this proves wrong, I apologize. Facts are still scarce or hidden in this case.

We have this guy, Mitt Romney who wants to be President, a mormon.

I've only heard Mitt say one thing so far, and that's that he can't believe that arguments about fringe religious doctrines will have an impact upon voters.

My dear muslim and mormon friends, you are both revisionists. You have taken the faith of the Jews and Christians and come up with something new and different. Muslims had some spirit whisper into a prophet's ear secrets of how to create a new "corrected" religion. Mormons had this guy Joe Smith told by another spirit via golden page tablets that have somehow disappeared, how Christianity had gotten it wrong again, and how to nicely fix it.

These are not little things. They are big things and they have resulted in odd things.

These revised instructions in both cases require real faith. Whispers or missing gold tablets, their origin could make one suspect the worse. But to people holding to that faith, they don't.

These are fundemental first things. Either they tell us a lot about their adherents if the followers are serious about their faith, or they tell us a lot about their adherents if they are not serious.

Romney can't believe voters care because I suppose in his heart he really doesn't care. That's OK but then please Mitt, admit it.

And if Mitt does care, do we want a man that believes in foundational secrets and special information running this country? I don't.

And if Mitt doesn't really care, do we want a man that doesn't care, who says one thing and believes another, running this country? I don't.

Besides, mormons are not clever. Claiming this golden book disappeared, and unable to find any DNA of the folks supposedly planted in the Americas is simple fraud uncovered. Sincere people yes, but that is besides the point. I don't want a President that is sincere about the wrong things.

Sameo regarding Keith Ellison, the first Muslim senator. The quran is a clever thing. Just enough real stuff from the Jews and Christians to make it sound good. Just enough seeds of destruction woven in to make me think there really was a clever spirit whispering. Scary.

Give me a Christian, Jew or atheist and I know where they're coming from at a basic foundational level. Anything else is a step in the wrong direction that will flower over time.

Oh, and this shooter fellow? I'm sure we all know about Suleyman the Conqueror. That was a close call to extinction for Western civilization. You know, that thing on its last legs but still an economic powerhouse?

Suleyman had many titles; in inscriptions he calls himself:

Slave of God, powerful with the power of God, deputy of God on earth, obeying the commands of the Qur'an and enforcing them throughout the world, master of all lands, the shadow of God over all nations, Sultan of Sultans in all the lands of Persians and Arabs, the propagator of Sultanic laws (Nashiru kawanin al-Sultaniyye ), the tenth Sultan of the Ottoman Khans, Sultan, son of Sultan, Suleyman Khan.

Slave of God, master of the world, I am Suleyman and my name is read in all the prayers in all the cities of Islam. I am the Shah of Baghdad and Iraq, Caesar of all the lands of Rome, and the Sultan of Egypt. I seized the Hungarian crown and gave it to the least of my slaves.

He called himself the "Master of the Lands of Caesar and Alexander the Great," and later as simply, "Caesar." It's hard, of course, not to be slightly humbled by assertions of such greatness, and no ruler in the sixteenth century was more adept at diminishing the egos of all the other rulers surrounding him.

Suleyman believed, however, that the entire world was his possession as a gift of God. Even though he did not occupy Roman lands, he still claimed them as his own and almost launched an invasion of Rome (the city came within a few hairbreadths of Ottoman invasion in Suleyman's expedition against Corfu). In Europe, he conquered Rhodes, a large part of Greece, Hungary, and a major part of the Austrian Empire. His campaign against the Austrians took him right to the doorway of Vienna.